


Entwined: A Bond of Fire and Stardust

by Kiintsugi



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: A lot of worldbuilding, Action, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And will be here by the end of this, Angst and Feels, Blood, Brutality, Character Study, Clexa, Clexa Endgame, Drama & Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Fantasy, Hurt/Comfort, Multiple Perspectives, Romance, Slow Burn, Survival, Violence, War, Worldbuilding, and its very inspired by fantasy writing, but its someday somewhere, dont mind me this is just my take on a canon au, head hopping, not quite someday here, oops we won, perspective changes by chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:34:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26716846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiintsugi/pseuds/Kiintsugi
Summary: “Ai laik Heda. Yu sou laik Wanheda. Oso skrud ste oso gada in.”Clarke raised an eyebrow, repeating the words back to her as if struggling to translate them in her head. “Our fate is our own? What does that mean?”“It means you and I are destined for this, Clarke of the Sky People.”
Relationships: Anya/Raven Reyes, Bellamy Blake/Echo, Clarke Griffin/Lexa, Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Octavia Blake/Lincoln
Comments: 55
Kudos: 503





	1. Clarke

**Author's Note:**

> The thing that bothers me most about the 100 is how they introduce a really cool concept, and then they drop it like its hot to introduce a new concept instead of exploring what they’ve already established. So, this fic sets out to really, and I mean really, explore grounder culture. It is a Clexa story, but it has story lines for several characters and how they have integrated into the grounder culture after the war with the mountain. I read a lot of high fantasy and I wrote this with that style in mind. So buckle up. Bc were about to dive into a world far more fleshed out than it probably needs to be.
> 
> anyway, this was posted before under my old psudo. when i deleted the account this fic went with it so i'm bringing it back under my new psudo. I am making some changes to it, some bigger than others, but the base story hasn't changed.

_Spotify Playlist for inspiration:_

_[https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1lrMBSDwX0qiRfUlB5PdYu?si=nGBJOFtlSfeyTY6rrXjxGA](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fplaylist%2F1lrMBSDwX0qiRfUlB5PdYu%3Fsi%3DnGBJOFtlSfeyTY6rrXjxGA&t=NTA2ZGZjNjk0NGRlMTM2M2ZkYWUzYTFiMTE1ZGMzYTdjYTk0MTUwOSxzTWJQNXFWZg%3D%3D&b=t%3Ad-isKNRI2LDC1YgU-sPMUQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fkiintsugi.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F629973940750680064%2Fafter-months-of-writers-block-and-crippling&m=1&ts=1600792350) _

_Also, the entire[Undaunted](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Falbum%2F68nUwjHsW0Yq63mkAekDnL%3Fsi%3DEG56IL7PTMCuY2DXFIE1xA&t=YzE0N2FlYmUwNDQ2NDk3OWUzM2ZlN2I5YzQ0M2E5MzU5NWU2ZTk4ZixzTWJQNXFWZg%3D%3D&b=t%3Ad-isKNRI2LDC1YgU-sPMUQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fkiintsugi.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F629973940750680064%2Fafter-months-of-writers-block-and-crippling&m=1&ts=1600792350) album by Really Slow Motion_

* * *

CLARKE

Acid lingered in the air. 

There were more days than Clarke could count where she wondered how so many people had survived on the damaged rock they called the ground, but now she found these environmental hazards to be little more than an annoyance. 

She sat in a small upturned automobile, watching through the cracked window as the thick, acidic fog rolled through the trees. She wasn’t the first to ride out a mist in the old metal box. Like many others around or on the Greensroad, it had been carved free from the terraformed Earth with a singular entry point made accessible to those who could fit inside. This particular box had room enough for at least two adults, but Clarke was alone; stretched out as far as she could extend her legs, head resting against the cracked glass and a thin fabric tied around her face to filter the air. 

Clarke liked being alone. Alone, no one could betray her. Alone, no one could blame her. Alone, no one could need her. She wasn’t responsible for anyone or anything. She only had herself to care for and only herself to blame. There was no one to save, no one to kill. It was her sacrifice – her punishment – because Clarke alone was the only one able to bear it. 

Victory stands on the back of sacrifice, Lexa’s words, not hers. The commander had taught her so many things. From survival to trust and to – most importantly – self-preservation. A lesson Lexa had enforced when she taught Clarke that anyone could betray her. Anyone. She had been alone ever since. 

Her choice. Not Lexa’s. 

Four long, arduous years – alone. Well, not entirely. 

Luna was in the automobile across the road from her own. Every few months the Captain of the Boat People and the self-exiled Commander of the Sky would meet at the shimmering stones, south of the Dropship where the black sands meet red water. They exchanged supplies and Luna would keep Clarke updated on the things she had learned about the governance of the twelve clans. If Clarke was particularly lucky, she even got another body to warm her furs at night. Sometimes Luna, other times, not. But, there was no luck to be found on this day. 

Clarke looked at her scarred hands. Her arms were wrapped in bandaging that would lead to new scars to add to her growing collection. As painful as they were, Clarke knew they had been worth the fight. Anything that could fix what she had done was worth the fight. Maybe that was why she was so keen to assist Luna when she came asking for help. Maybe it was selfish of her. Maybe being selfish only added to her mistakes. But, she had never seen Luna so desperate. She knew she had to help. 

The Fog continued to bellow. She used to fear the fog, more than acid rains, or the flaming rivers, or even the two-faced wolves that stood so tall she could mount their backside like a horse. She wasn’t scared of any of that now. She rolled over onto her shoulder and closed her eyes. Sometimes she wondered if she was afraid of anything at all. All she ever felt these days was the weight. It made her envy the fog. The fog was light, careless, free. 

There was a tapping on her window. Luna, wrapped in fabrics and goggles – a mess of green and blue and wild, fiery hair – stood over the glass. “It’s passed now,” she pointed. “We should get moving.” 

Clarke nodded, stretched her arms above her head with an arched back and tightly pressed eyes. She realized she must have fallen asleep, but doesn’t bother to glance through the trees to read the sun. The sky was still hazy, and the sun is orange and large behind polluted skies. It hurt her eyes too much to do any more than squint, even after shielding them with dark lensed goggles of her own. 

Luna helped Clarke climb free of the rusty metal box, careful to close the hatch to protect the cracked glass casing, and threw a mesh blanket of woven vines and heavy fabrics over the top. Acid Fog came once every few weeks and it was common practice to leave the shelters in as good of condition as they had been found in. 

Luna tangled her fingers in the loose tendril ribbons of her cloak, behind the golden chains that clung to her tunic, and pulled out a short, curved blade. She cut one of the ribbon-like strips and tied it around her forehead, over the boiled leather rim of her goggles. Her forehead was pink and swollen from the lingering acid and when Luna handed another strip to her, she assumed her own skin looked the same. 

“We have a lot of ground to make up before nightfall.” Luna pulled the hood of her cloak over her head. “Follow,” She said. And so, she did. 

Free? _No_ , Clarke thought as she fell into step behind the Captain. She would never be free. Lexa had made sure of that. 

They walked in relative silence for some time, until the sky grew dark and the forest began to howl before they came to an eerie, yet familiar stretch of trees; ones that were broken and splintered. There was a bird's nest tucked into the skeletal ribs of a long dead man trapped in a parachute that hung from one of the larger undamaged trees, “Conner & Jessica” carved into its trunk. Below hung a piece of parchment nailed to a Gluebark tree beside the large carved oak. 

Clarke ran her fingers down the faded image. It had been hanging for so long that the corners had become brittle and frayed, the charcoal imaged faded and smeared. Still, the likeness was unmistakable: round face, dimpled chin, narrowed eyes and a bitter scowl. It made her look angry – deadly even. She couldn’t say it was inaccurate. She was angry, she was deadly – now more than ever. 

Frustration surging through her, Clarke reached for the bounty. 

“Klark, hod op,” Luna had warned, but she didn’t listen. She yanked the parchment from the nail, shredded it in two, and stuffed the pieces in her cloak. 

“What if someone saw,” Luna stressed, an urgent hand finding its way to Clarke’s shoulder. “What if–” 

“What if, what?” Clarke spat. “If Lexa wanted me dead, I’d be dead by now. We both know that.” 

Luna shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not the Commander.” 

A sense of dread closed around her. The commander ruled the twelve clans, yes, but sometimes Clarke forgot that there were more enemies in the coalition than she would care to admit. Some of them far more dangerous than the Commander who would slit the throats of her and every other Arker still alive if given the chance. There was some 500 or so of them now; if the rumors were to be believed. That would have meant that less than a quarter of population had survived from when Clarke first came to the ground with ninety-nine others. 2,659 people dwindled down to a mere 500. Maybe even less than that. 

But, the dread that closed in on her wasn't because of the lives already lost. No, Clarke felt this pain around her heart because there wasn’t an Arker alive, or dead for that matter, as hated as her. Not even 500 well-armed Arkers could stop an army from coming for her head. She had learned that lesson time and time again. No bloodshed was too much. Not for her. It was why Clarke insisted on being alone and it was why Luna refused to let her. 

Returning from Luna’s quest, they had ridden by horseback until they reached the forest. There, they traded their agile, two-faced mares for supplies and continued on foot. That was almost a week ago. Foot travel was harder to track in the thickets of Trikru lands, but the idea of spending several more days in the forest made the dread settle even heavier on her chest. 

What made it even worse was how they traveled. There was no stopping in villages or inns to sleep on a bed or eat a hot meal, nor was there any fires made when they settled at camp – if it could even be called a camp. Clarke was used to living that way, but her bones ached and her muscles trembled with exhaustion from the way they had pushed themselves. They had traveled so far, and Clarke was beginning to reach her limit. Even in the forest – this forest – there came a time when enough was enough. 

“There’s an outpost nearby,” Clarke found herself saying. “I’ve been there before. We could sleep in their stables tonight.” 

Luna looked at her, incredulous. “I don’t like this forest any more than you do,” she reasoned. “But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t do anything that would cause us to be here anymore than we have to.” 

“We’ve already lost the day,” Clarke argued. “It doesn’t matter where we sleep.” 

Luna’s head rocked from side to side as she debated Clarke’s argument. What was a few hours trek to the north going to cost them that the fog hadn’t already taken? 

“We’ll move much quicker tomorrow with a hot meal and a straw bed.” 

Luna mulled. “You’re not wrong,” she admitted, groaning. But Clarke could tell she was still hesitant to agree. 

If she knew Luna as well as she thought she did, she would be wanting to cut their night short and get as to the coast as fast as possible. Like Clarke, she was extremely hesitant to trust anyone on the main lands. The idea of leaving their whereabouts and their well-being in the hands of a stranger was an uncertainty that undoubtedly made Luna nervous. 

“I know her. She won’t talk,” Clarke promised. 

Luna sighed and pressed her palms against Clarke’s shoulders, squeezing. “Everyone talks,” she told her, frowning. “But you have a point. We will travel better with a good night’s rest.” 

Now, it was Clarke’s turn to take the lead. She pulled her cloak over her head, careful to hide the gold of her hair, and smeared her face with black war paint that resembled the intricacies of the tree people. Too many knew her face in this forest and Clarke had learned that isn’t always a good thing. 

As they set off, Luna fell into step behind her. She could tell by her steps that she was careful to place her feet exactly where Clarke had, and at times, she would run over to a tree and rip at the bark before stepping backwards over her own prints. It was a clever trick, one she wished she would have thought of when the hundred first came to Earth, but Clarke then wondered how many it would actually fool – or if it would even fool at all. 

* * *

By the time they had reached the outpost, there was just shy of a dozen miles and four hours behind them. The outpost lingered just south of the Arkadian border and east of the Trikru capital. By all accounts, it was one of the most dangerous places for someone like Clarke or Luna to hide, but Clarke had learned that it was precisely because of that threat that no one expected her to be there. 

Luna looked upon the outpost with nervous suspicion. It was a small, almost dingy shack with a stable for horses and an old automobile that was used for acid fog and rain off to the side. The outpost had a fire place that always bellowed smoke, a roasting pit out front that was slow cooking a boar, and a cloth dome tent around back used for salting and preserving foods. She then asked her who owned the outpost, to which Clarke told her, “Ravor Kom Trikru.” 

“But,” Clarke reassured. “It’s his daughter who runs the shop.” Clarke didn’t know if Luna knew Ravor, knew of him, or knew nothing at all. But she was certain that if she had heard anything about the old man, it wasn’t good. His daughter on the other hand was a soft spoken and tender-hearted woman only roughly familiar with the warrior’s tongue. She was nothing at all like her father and often times forgotten or ignored by the man and the warriors who came to honor him. Even still, she was as clever as the rangers and knew from Clarke’s accent alone that she was no nomad seeking shelter from the storms. 

“Ravor fought for the Ice King,” Luna said with a soft whisper as they reached the roasting boar. 

Clarke stopped to ask Luna what she meant but she had already cut her off before she even got a chance to open her mouth to explain. “Before your time.” 

“He doesn’t know my face,” Clarke told her, reaching for the door. “And he doesn’t know Flokru.” 

Inside was a maze of rusted shelving units packed to the brim with trinkets and gadgets. Furs hung from every wall and several others had been stuffed into large plastic bins on the bottom shelves. There were jars of pickled everything; jars of dried herbs and spices, jars of blood, talons and teeth, jars of eyeballs in strange green goo. There were salted animal carcass hanging from ropes that dangled from the ceiling while leathers from their skins hung from tanning racks. There was also broken alarm clocks, watches that ticked backwards, batteries, bullet shells, scissors, plastic dolls with faces half melted or legs missing, music boxes, deflated balls; anything and everything valuable and interesting crammed into shelves. 

At the back of the shop near the crackling fire sat Niylah, a slender woman with a long face and even longer yellow hair. She wore a dark green shirt that brought out the color of her eyes which were accented with flecks of yellow from the light of the fire. She was sewing something that Clarke believed to be a fur lined wool cloak for the oncoming winter. When the shopkeep noticed two women standing in her doorway, she stopped sewing and reached for a glass dagger that sat beside her. 

Clarke peered around the aisles, scanning for faces both known and unknown before pulling the hood of her cloak down and exposing her goggle clad, war painted face. She pulled down the thin cloth that covered her mouth, pulled the goggles over her forehead, and met Niylah’s smile with one of her own. Then, with her best common tongue, she asked if they were alone. 

“My father is gone. He went to Polis,” Niylah told her. Her English had gotten far better than Clarke’s common tongue since she last saw her. She had been practicing. 

Clarke smiled. 

Niylah pointed to Luna with the glass blade. “Chon yu Bilaik?” 

Luna put her hands up in defense. Slowly, she pulled the cloak back from her own face. “Ai lukot.” 

This seemed to diffuse the situation and Niylah put down her blade. She pushed her work away and stood, bringing her attention back to Clarke. ”You come for food? Or for bed?” 

“Both.” 

Niylah eyed Luna again but thee her gaze aside and began to wander through the aisles, glancing at the shelves as she passed instead. She pulled a plastic crate off of one of the lower shelves, dropped to her knees and reached into the hole the crate had once occupied. She pulled out a dusty blanket of stitched rabbit furs, shook it clean, and replaced the crate. Then, she reached across the aisle and plucked two silvery spoons from a cracked ceramic jar, a small plastic bowl and a slightly larger ceramic bowl with chipped edges and thin, hairline cracks that ran through it like dark veins. 

She motioned for them to follow her and Clarke and Luna joined Niylah by the fire as she filled their bowls with a thick, bubbling pumpkin and cheese soup and topped it with the ends of day-old bread. It was Clarke’s first hot meal in nearly six weeks and it smelled so incredible that her mouth was watering by the time Niylah served them. 

The women muttered their thanks and began slurping the hot liquid down with ravenous haste. As payment, Luna fished out several vials of ointment from their bag. Some black, others milky white or yellow or pale green in color. Niylah picked up two of the vials between her fingers and held them to the flames, examining them. She pointed to Clarke. “Did you make this?” 

Clarke nodded. 

She smiled and scooped up two more vials. “Good. Ai take four.” 

“Two,” Clarke bargained. 

“You want ai take whole bag?” 

From the corner of her eye, Clarke saw Luna reach for her knife. She threw a hand down to stop her, grabbing the hilt of the blade and Luna’s hand, forcing it back down. 

“Four.” Clarke grabbed the blackest of the vials. “But not this one.” 

Niylah shrugged and selected four of the remaining vials. Once paid, she left them to settle in by the fire. 

Heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows and Clarke settled in to the comfort of discretion offered by Niylah’s home. The heat of the fire had begun to penetrate her cloak and warm her aching bones, soothing her feet and aching cuts. Luna pulled off her leather boots while Clarke stripped her cloak and pulled up her sleeves. The air had begun to chill as of late, and with no fire to accompany them on their travels, Clarke had become intensely aware of the impending winter. They had hoped to make it to the red shores before the first snowfall; where freezing to death was the best sort of death to be had. But, with the bite that nipped at their heels these past several nights and the and the fog that took nearly a day away from them, Clarke feared they may have to make other arrangements. 

Winter was harsh. That was the lesson they had learned on the ark. The radiation would make the summers hit record highs and, as a result, make the winters hit record lows. Her teachers would make her learn descriptive words and learn to read weather patterns from the archives and the satellite feeds that made their rounds across the Earth, but nothing they had ever taught them prepared them for the reality of it all: Winter was a killer and summer was its accomplice. 

If they didn’t make it to the docks before the first snow, it was doubtful the skeleton crew waiting for them, even under Luna’s command, would be skilled enough to cross the treacherous oceans back to the islands Luna called her homelands. Clarke had hoped to wait out the season on one of the islands, and return to the mainland when the ice fangs of winter melted. She was beginning to believe she may be better off finding an old hole in the ground and hibernating like a bear. They still had time, of course. The past three of Clarke’s five winters on the ground came more than a month from now. But, it worried Clarke the beast had begun to crawl into the night so soon, frosting the trees and leaving the streams as cold as ice itself. The days warmed up well enough, but they were short lived and weaker with each passing night. 

“The stables will be cold tonight,” Niylah’s voice rang, shaking Clarke from her wonderings. She was holding another fur blanket, thicker than the sewn rabbit furs Clarke was usually provided. She noticed it was lined with gray wool on one side and that whatever animal they had skinned had a much thicker coat than the rabbits as well. “Take this.” 

There was a look of sadness in her eyes, bordering on pity. Clarke grimaced and cast her eyes away. She could light no fire in the stables and the hay would be damp and reek of horse shit and rot. Even so, it was better than sleeping out in the forest where she would be cold and wet and exposed, also with no fire and nothing but the cloak on her back to keep her warm. 

Clarke gave Niylah her thanks as Luna took the blanket and draped it over her arms with the other. When they left the outpost, Niylah closed the wooden door behind them and the light of the candles and fire that illuminated through the parting of the drapes through the windows began to go out one by one. 

“Do you want first watch,” Luna asked as they settled in the stables on their beds of hay and furs. “Or should I take it?” She stuffed a crudely carved wooden pipe with cloves and herbs, struck a spark stone with her knife, and inhaled. 

“No,” she answered as she wrapped herself in a blanket of furs. “You take it.” She laid her head down onto the plush cocoon of furs and hay that smelled vaguely of shit and mostly of mold and watched the little ball of red in Luna’s pipe glow smaller until darkness was all that remained. If she fell asleep, she didn’t remember doing so. Maybe that was why she was so shocked when she was suddenly shaken in the dark. 

“Wake up,” Luna hissed, shaking her shoulder with an abrupt haste. She curled her shoulders inward, tucking her head into her chest. Luna grabbed her again, prying her shoulders back and whispering for her to wake up a second time – harsher than the first. “Klark.” 

Clarke rolled over and pushed on her arms. Luna had pulled the door to the barn almost completely shut, leaving only a crack of space between the two doors. Through that, Clarke could see a figured lingering by the outpost. There was no firelight left from the roasting pit. The figured was black as shadow, a mass of muscle and power, and decorated with horns that made it look like a demon from her nightmares. It was tall, taller than the doorway to the outpost and at least two heads taller than herself. 

She heard Luna’s breath leave her in a long hiss, the woman’s fingers digging into the fabrics of her back. The figure crooked their neck up towards the sky and from behind, Clarke could feel Luna sinking back into the depths of the stable. It lingered there for a moment, as motionless and quiet as Clarke. Then, the figure’s head snapped back. Clarke threw her hand over her mouth to hold back the gasp of shock as it slowly turned towards the barn. 

The sound of leaves rustling in the wind swept past the barn on either side of her. It was a slow, uneasy wind, as if it were stalking a deer – careful not to disturb its prey. The wind wrapped around to the front of the barn, met in the middle, and then headed towards the figure where one turned to three and their attention fell to the outpost. 

“Inforsas,” Luna hissed, still retreating to the back of the stable. 

Clarke inched forward. She crept down from the mound of hay, inching towards the crack in the double doors. She pressed her cheek against the wooden frame, watching as the figures meandered near the outpost. She realized then that there was no metal ringing as the blade of the figure’s sword cut into the earth as it trailed behind in lazy hand. The figure reached down and readied the sword in both hands and with once ferocious lurch, the blade kicked up the ground and tore through the wooden door. 

Splinters showered the earth. The figures stood motionless as wood rained onto them, piercing and bouncing off of flesh. The steel bit the wood a second time, then a third before the door was completely knocked in by a powerful thrust of the shadowed figure’s boot. 

Something snatched Clarke’s arm and she whirled her head around to find that Luna, now armed with her curved knife, urging her towards the back of the stable. “We have to go,” she whispered. She noticed Luna had found a small hole in the wooden frame of the stables, just large enough to crawl through. 

Clarke yanked her arm free and shook her head. “Not without Niylah.” She drew her knife from its leather sheath at her waist. It was a stout, curved blade no longer in length than the palm of her hand. It was all she had – and it had to be enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and don't forget to come chat with me at https://kiintsugi.tumblr.com/ where i post headcanons, fic ideas, shitposts and nonsense, answer questions and even post unedited excerpts of my writing!


	2. Lexa

There were few times in which Lexa allowed herself to indulge in  simple pleasures , but as her horn was filled with Ale once more, it struck her that this night might be one of them. 

Lexa had done what no commander before her had. She had become the first Commander  to rule over twelve clans. And, for the first time since that great achievement, Lexa settled into her seat in the Great Hall of Polis with warm cheeks and a smile on her lips. 

The hall was heavy with the scents of feasting. Meats roasted in a crust of garlic and herbs, mashed squashes swimming in butter and even sweet breads; a delicacy from the most western clan, the Plains Riders, filled the tables from end to end. The stone walls were decorated in banners of every color. Green, white, black and red, light and dark blue, oranges and yellows and grays and brown with the symbol of each Clan embroidered in gold or silver or black. All twelve clans, seated as their banners were displayed, among one another, in celebration of the time of great peace.

There were thirteen tables in the hall. Four rows of three tables, one for each clan, overlooked by the high table of command where Lexa and the other clan leaders sat side by side. There was laughing and cheering and playful shoving, hooting and singing, all mixed with the clamor of cups and knives and forks and plates. Even the Ice Queen seemed in high spirits tonight. The usually cold and merciless leader was drunk on wine, laughing at war stories with other leaders, and smiling widely as she slapped her son, Prince Roan, on the back as he filled his wine cup to quench his increasing large thirst. 

Lexa sat surrounded by the most prominent and influential individuals in all of the coalition. Her mentor, Anya Kom Trikru, had come first and seated herself to Lexa’s left as her mentee, Aden Kom Trikru, took the seat to her right. Titus took his place as the eldest  Flamekeeper to the left of Lexa and Anya, with his head bowed so low his face had practically been buried in his thick  olive- green robes. 

They were joined at by the Queen of Azgeda and the Crown Prince. Both Nia and her son arrived in cloaks decorated in sapphires and silver, with beautiful snow-white silks and crowns forged from antlers that sat atop their heads like frozen thorns. Next, came the Dynast King of Rockline, Lord Gronn, dressed in a powder blue doublet with intricate stitch work that embodied his clan sigil proudly upon his chest in magnificent gold. He was joined by his wife Mareen as well as his lover of whom Lexa did not know the name, who had begun to show that she was swollen with child.

War chiefs, Indra Kom Trikru, Roza kom Sankru, and Ayle of the Broadleaf all came in next. Indra dressed comfortably in black jerkin and matching trousers with leather strappings and empty sword sheaths hanging from her belt. It was a far stretch in luxury from the clans of royalty, but Indra had earned her place as leader of Trikru in battle, not from bloodlines, and Lexa knew that Trikru neither had or cared for luxury textiles that did little more than display wealth. However, Roza and Ayle, war lords as powerful as Indra, came dressed in satin and velvet: one in yellow, the other in green, both accented with white and orange. 

Then, came the leaders of The Shadow Valley, Blue Cliff, Glowing Forest, and Delphi. Each displaying a uniqueness to their homelands – and themselves – with strange statements in fashion that Lexa had never seen during times of great war. Suki of the Blue Cliff wore her hair in a strange spire that looked like a large insect had  settled atop her head, while Azulon from the Glowing Forest had sleek, oiled hair that glowed as vibrant as forest he ruled. The plains Riders came  in  wearing scarcely more than leather and furs, while Podakru’s Niro wore tight fitting  rubbery  fabrics that covered them from ankle to jaw. 

By the third hour of the great feast, all twelve tables had been filled , and eleven of the twelve clan leaders had found a place at the high table. 

“Where’s Luna?” Aden asked as he sunk his teeth into a piping , hot sausage. The boy was on his third and already flagging down one of the serving girls for another  fill . 

Lexa lowered her horn and peered down the table towards the empty chair. It was strange to see Luna of all people absent, but not unheard of. The seas were fierce and unforgiving, and no one before Luna had ever tamed them. “Luna’s war is with the black salt seas and the flaming red shores,” Lexa explained as she settled back into her seat. “not the mountain.” 

Aden frowned. Luna had become something of an idol to the boy and everyone in the capital knew of his excitement over seeing her again. The serving girl piled two more sausages onto his plate, and as Aden’s eyes raised to meet them, Lexa reached over his head and filled his horn with beer.  He looked from his plate to his horn and then to Lexa, and a smile returned. 

“Tonight, we celebrate,” Lexa told him, raising her own horn. “The mountain is gone,” 

“And the sky is calm.” Aden’s horn clattered against her own as he finished her words for her. They drank their beer and Aden wiped the froth away from his face, his features flushed, and laughed. Laughter was a rare sound in the Coalition, especially from children, of whom – Lexa had learned – always had the best. 

Aden was fourteen winters now – hardly a boy at all – but his laugh was easily Lexa’s favorite. 

He had come to her as a boy of ten with more training on how to make a sword than on how to wield one. Titus had urged she send the boy off to apprentice in the capital with an armorer instead of training him herself, repeatedly asking, “What good does a blacksmith’s boy do for the Commander?” and, “What could he possibly have that could aid you?” 

At the time, Lexa wasn’t sure. There was something, she knew. She just didn’t know what. And so she told him, “I’ve made up my mind,” sparing him of the fact that she had decided upon Aden’s fate the moment he had walked into the throne room and that Titus' vehement protest to the idea had absolutely zero impact on her decision. “He is to begin training as the Commander’s second at first light.” 

“Such an honor belongs to the children of rangers.” Titus’ voice  had  raised . It had only  been  the smallest amount, but it did raise. “Not, to children who come selling  pigeons at the Commander’s feet for a few coins .” 

Lexa leaned forward in her throne and gripped at arms smoothed by wear and littered with stabbings from her own blade. “Such an honor,” she corrected, her voice as unyielding as iron, “belongs to whomever I see fit to rule as regent in my absence.” It was all the correction Titus needed, and Aden had been faithful at her side ever since. 

_ The boy deserved to laugh _ , Lexa thought, maybe they all did. 

But, Anya wasn’t laughing. “You celebrate slaying the mountain and yet you don’t invite the very people who slayed it for you.” 

Aden turned to her, leaning over his plate with curiosity in his eyes. For Aden, Anya was his greatest council, the same way she was for Lexa all those years ago. “You think we should have invited the Sky People?” 

“I think,” Anya said, “That you shouldn’t be so quick to forget who they are.” She leaned her elbows onto the table and rested her chin atop scarred hands. “Or what they’re capable of.” 

“An ally is only an ally when they have a common enemy,” Lexa agree, repeating words she had learned so long ago . Words that felt as much a part of her as the blood than rain in her veins. 

Aden looked to Lexa, then to Anya, confused. “Then,” he started, pausing for a moment to choose his words. “The sky people are our enemy? What about Indra and Trikru?” 

“Indra and Sky people share their lands and their resources.” Lexa looked past Luna’s empty chair to where Indra sat. She looked almost uncomfortable even though she had been seated with friends and allies, other war chiefs whose title was as earned and respected as her own. “They have more to consider when choosing who their enemies are.” 

This made Aden shift in his chair. Lexa had learned to note that he did so when he was filled with great ponderings. He never spoke without first making sure to have understood every word that was said to him, or until he was certain he had crafted the best possible question to clarify his lack of understanding. 

There were many things Aden did not yet understand. Most of them, Lexa didn’t understand herself. She had, however, through years of battle and command, learned how to navigate them and make the best decisions given the uniqueness to her reign. The Mountain, the Coalition, the reapers: she learned them all well. But, when it came to the people who fell from the sky like stars, Lexa knew very little. 

Leaving Aden to his pondering, Lexa turned her attention back to the feast. The twelve tables before them were packed with warriors and rangers, great ambassadors and nobles and other people of great influence in the Coalition. Most were invited by their clan’s leader, men and women Lexa had probably never met; others were invited by Lexa personally. It was suggested by Titus that Lexa invite families with strong ties to the previous commanders. Lexa didn’t agree. Most the families of past commanders were long dead, and those still alive threw around the titles of royalty even though they couldn’t even remember the commander in their own bloodline. 

Lexa chose to invite the common folk. She invited the Trikru merchant who sold her salt cured goose eggs, the old woman in the south who would come bringing the finest candles in the entire Coalition, and fisherman on the lake who would bring shining trinkets from the bottom of the lake to the children. All of them important to her in their own way, but none as important as Irsa – the mother of her lover – of whom Lexa did not see at all. 

“She didn’t come, did she?” 

Lexa gave a weary sigh. “Four years I invite her,” Lexa finished off her ale and tossed the horn onto the table in frustration. “Four years she doesn’t come.” 

“Do you honestly think that that she would? Sit at a table with the Azgedan elite. Gorge herself on food with the queen who severed her daughter’s head not ten feet away?” Anya pointed her knife down the long table to where Nia and her son sat laughing. “Do you think she’d let her?” 

“I’m afraid, I have to agree with Anya, Heda,” said Titus. He leaned forward and kept his voice low. “Alliances between the clans might mean something to us, but it has little impact on the common warrior.” 

She knew this, but it did nothing to soothe the sting of her absence. Her horn was refreshed at once and her plate topped off with peppers, to which she waved the serving boy away. She stared at her plate, piled high like a mountain, and felt the bile build in the back of her throat. She swallowed it back, buried her hand face in her hand, brooding all the while. 

What enjoyment she had allowed herself was gone now. The feast appeared to her as little more than shouting warriors squabbling over sausages and sweet breads. She watched as a warrior with eyes as pale as the moon and a face tattooed purple around the brow stabbed the hand of someone at their own table and wave a severed finger about in triumphant victory, sausage dangling from his mouth. Allies or not, the coalition was twelve clans and they were beginning to run out of common enemies. 

But, the feast carried on and Lexa drank. She drank until the fifth hour, when the feasting hall began to empty and her guests sauntered off. Some retreated to their homes, but most would surely be pouring into the streets of Polis to continue the celebrations until sunrise, Lexa was certain. Before long, only a handful of the clan leaders remained; awaiting escorts to their guest chambers within the Commander’s keep. Young seconds would wander in on occasion to show someone off to their beds, but the process was slow and the leaders were stuffed and tired. 

She could hear their conversations more clearly now: Gronn was going on in usual loudness about wanting to wed one of his daughters (the pretty one – he insisted) to Nia’s son. The Dynast king had many daughters, but only one among them Gronn saw as worthy of his pride. It was not the pretty one. The one Gronn loved the most was the only one he called by name: Marka. She was sharp as a needle and fierce as fire. Lexa had tried to persuade Gronn into allowing her to train as a ranger in the capital on more than once occasion, but he would not hear it. “She has fire in her blood, Heda,” Gronn had told her. “You have fire in your spirit, yes. No one’s got that but you. But, she’s blood. She’s too good to be a ranger.” And that was that. 

The pretty one was closer to Aden in age than Roan. Aden had blushed the first time he saw her, and brought her flowers when Gronn asked that she train with him while he was visiting the capital. “Make the boy toughen her up,” he had told her. “She needs to learn how to fight.” But, Lexa learned that they spent the day crafting shatter stones and arrowheads at the armory instead of sparing. 

Even drunk on wine, Nia was no fool.  “You think I would marry my son to one of your lesser children?” She had asked, offended. “The only good pretty does is come soft to the eyes. Azgeda,” she spat, “has no use for soft.” 

“Take the ugly one then, or the smart one,” he said. “or all of them – I don’t care. He can have any of them he wants. Any of them, except Marka.” Gronn sucked the air through his teeth, picking at his gums with the tip of a knife. “Besides, she’s no good for making heirs. She’s a warrior.” 

“Still going on about that daughter of his?” Indra had asked, pulling up a chair across from her. 

“When is he not?” 

Roan stood from his chair, his fist slamming against the table. “I will not be spoken of as if I am not here,” he demanded. The outburst had caused the room to fall silent. Everyone now had their eyes on the Crown Prince, the Dynast King, and the Ice Queen. 

Nia’s wine reddened face grew dark.  She snatched one of the Peter plates not yet cleaned for the table and stuck it across the back of Roan’s head. She had struck him so hard that the metal returned to the table bent and misshapen and Roan tumbled forward. 

Roan landed with his elbows on the table top; a pinkish drool hanging from his open mouth. Nia sneered, “I will do whatever I damn well please, you insulant child.” But, Roan was no child. A man of twenty-four winters – the same as herself –  Roan lived under the long  casting shadow that was his mother’s reign and his father’s legacy.

He stood like that for a moment and Nia went back to ignoring he was there at all. “Not Marka,” she agreed. “I’m afraid my son would bring shame to a woman such as Marka. And you know as well as I that there is no place for shame in royal blood.” 

Gronn grunted and waved a dismissive hand. “So be it,” he said. “Perhaps we can arrange a trade of seconds, instead.” 

Lexa peeled her eyes away and refocused her attention on Indra, who was eyeing Nia with a sour expression. “She as dangerous as ever,” Indra observed. “A wonder she hasn’t betrayed the coalition.” 

“So long as the rest of the clans remain united, Nia’s army has already lost.” Lexa reminded, a point that had been proven once before. It didn't matter how ambitious or power-hungry Nia became, it was common knowledge that so long as the eleven clans stood together against the Ice Nation, they had the superior army. "Ice nation hates the Sky People almost as much as they hated the mountain," she twisted her neck, cracking the bones. "and we can't forget about the  reapers , either." 

Indra gave a long sigh that was followed by an even longer pause. "I fear that the reapers won't be enough to keep the Coalition together, Heda." 

Anya threw a shady glare towards Indra. "What have you done?" 

"I did what was best for my people." Indra stood, her shoulders back and her chin high. "Can you honestly say that you would  have done any different?"

“What did you do?” 

Anya stood meet Indra’s challenge and Lexa, not missing a breath reached out and grabbed her by her sleeve to pull her back down with grace. Then she turned to Indra, who understood and sat back down as well. With them seated, Lexa threw a gaze towards the Queen and found that she was still locked into conversation with Gronn. “Need I remind you of the company we keep?” 

Indra bowed her head. Anya did the same. “My apologies, Heda.” They said atop one another in a much lower tone. 

Horn in hand, Lexa gave a dismissive wave and drained her cup. “Now,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “You will tell me what has become of your relationship with the Sky People.” 

“Our relationship is the same,” she answered. Lexa was about to ask another question when Indra decided to elaborate. “But, Lincoln returned to the gates last week.” 

“Impossible,” Lexa argued. “we had word from the spiders that Lincoln had been taken by slavers.” 

“It appears he has made it back to Arkadia.” Indra looked around. She seemed hesitant to elaborate any more, but she swallowed stones and looked Lexa square in the eyes. “He claims that Clarke broke him out of the slave market.” 

Anya leaned forward. “What about the Enforcers?” 

“Killed them. I found their bodies myself.” 

Breaking out of the slave market. Killing an enforcer. Neither were easy to do. Doing both – some would claim – impossible. But, even as disbelieving as they were, Lexa found herself wrapped around the most impossible claim of all: Clarke Griffin was alive. 

No one, not even The Shadow, could tell Lexa of Clarke's fate after the war. There were search teams sent by the sky people, bounty hunters sent by the Clans, no one ever found her. There wasn't even a trail to follow. Lexa often wondered if she had somehow returned to the sky after the war. She did slay a mountain, maybe flying wasn't completely out of her realm of skills.  After all, she they flew down. How much harder could it have been to fly back up? 

She had to know. 

From the balcony of her personal chambers, Lexa could see the scar, and within it, the metal lands of the Sky People. She found herself there, white knuckled against the railing, staring. In the dark, she could hardly see more than the light of the towers. There were six that she could see from her chambers, and many more across her lands that she could not. The scar was as black as the night itself, shadowing even the distant structure that had formed it. 

“You know,” a voice called from behind her. “In your last life you used to come here to think too.” 

Lexa pivoted and found Anya had invited herself in. She toe-walked across the room and leaned against the railing To Lexa’s right. For a long while, she didn’t say anything. She looked out into the dark of night; eyes cast to the sky. 

She liked to watch the dancing stars when she was deep in thought. There was a beauty in it; the endless sea of stars. They were so quiet, calm, always watching. It gave her comfort in her nights at war to know that anywhere she was, the stars would always be there. Anya had taught her to read them, how to maps from them. She taught her the stories and the legends. She taught her to love the stars. She wondered, do the sky people appreciate the stars as much as she did? As much as Clarke once did? 

Lexa looked at Anya. The woman had been through more than she could even imagine these past few years. The scars that ran across her body like jagged red cracks – fire breaking out from under her skin, up her neck, swollen and shining around a narrowed eye – was proof enough of her struggles. They served as a memento of a war she wasn’t powerful to end on her own. It made Lexa’s stomach twist. 

When Clarke brought her to Anya, swollen and bloody and hardly clinging to life, Lexa didn’t expect her make it through the night. She watched her for over a week, sky healers dotting over her mentor with strange equipment and techniques Lexa thought resembled torture more than it did healing. She listened to her labored breathing, her piercing screams, convinced that Clarke had brought her empty promises. But, Anya survived it all. Even when Lexa was sure she wouldn’t. The sky people always held on to hope, even when all hope was lost. 

“Stop.” Anya realized she was staring, but didn’t shift her gaze from the distant trees. She knew Lexa better than anyone, responding to the silence as if she could read her thoughts. “You’re over thinking again.” 

“I shouldn’t have sent you to fight my war.” 

Anya scoffed. "If it we're you instead of me, you'd be dead." 

"If it were me instead of you we would have brought a bigger army." 

"And they'd all be dead." Anya pushed off the railing. "You underestimated them, because I underestimated them." She looked out into the forest towards the scar. "We won't do that again." 

Her head was nodding, but she wasn’t completely certain it was of her own accord. She had underestimated them, one time, and it cost her 300 of her rangers. It nearly cost her Anya. But, she had never underestimated since. When it came to the Sky People, Lexa learned to be prepared for just about anything. 

Just about, because she hadn’t expected this. 

The only thing that was ever predictable about Clarke was that she was incredibly unpredictable. Lexa thought she was weak, and she killed 300 of her rangers. Lexa thought that Clarke was wise, but the woman never listened to her own logic. She thought they had a spark, Clarke turned her away. She thought that Clarke could survive anything, and she disappeared entirely. 

She thought wrong. 

When it came to Clarke, Lexa always thought wrong. 

“I’m not sure I believe you,” Lexa said after a long moment. She wanted to say she wasn’t sure about anything these days, but her lips didn’t part and the words didn’t come. She thought, her lips pressed as the realization struck her, perhaps it was better that way. Anya knew the sky people car better than she did. Just as she knew the Trikru better than she did. Politics and alliances and wars, Lexa knew, but the clans she did not. 

Anya swept a hand across the scar. “I don’t think any of us will ever underestimate them again. In fact, I worry that if this news spreads, we may have more to worry about than the black gates.” 

It struck her then that this was the reason Anya came after her. Lexa felt herself blink. It was slow, and the darkness behind her eyelids began to swirl with purple; flashing patterns of dull colors that made her head spin. She swallowed the stones that dammed her throat and opened her eyes. “Who knows?” 

It took Anya a long while to answer that. “No one knows for certain” she said, much to Lexa’s pleasure. Anya looked back through Lexa’s chambers towards the heavy double doors. “But there are those, both friend and foe alike, who have their suspicions. If not before, then now. Your abrupt dismissal tonight didn’t bode well for your relationship with the more the curious minds at the high table. Even some of the more perceptive commoners may have an inkling about it.” Anya turned back her, her almond eyes - one scorched, the other as bright as a midsummer morning in the Trikru forest - staring at her with more concern than she had seen and in all her years of command. “You don’t remember what had happened. You don’t know what is about to be unleashed.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, thank you to everyone who made it here and i hope this chapter kept you entertained in all the best ways!  
> Chapter 3, in Anya's perspective, is on the way soon!  
> and don't forget to come chat with me at https://kiintsugi.tumblr.com/ where i post headcanons, fic ideas, shitposts and nonsense, answer questions and even post unedited excerpts of my writing!


	3. Anya

“Yield,” Anya called out,  slashing at Aden with dull steel . 

Aden’s blade  swept across  his body and clashed with her own , flashing a wicked grin that made Anya growl with frustration as they impact pushed them apart. She stuck again and  Aden’s sword met her own  again with eerily familiar, resounding confidence.  _ Clank. Clank. Clank.  _ Each strike sent the boy backwards; one step, two, one again ; and yet, he managed to meet her blow for blow for blow. 

This time, as Aden stumbled back, Anya swiped upwards. Her blade scarred the leather chest plate he donned for protection as it drew  up , missing his nose only by a breath as he arched his back as far as he could.  He stumbled back  against stone and Anya swiped again.  “Yield!”

Aden rolled, dodging the blow and letting Anya’s sword scream against the statue as it bounced off the goddess’s hip. He danced left, his sword jabbing out from the stone statue nicking her arm and tearing at the fabrics of her tunic as he scurried around  the backside of the statue “I don’t yield ,” he told her, poking his head out from behind the statue.

Anya rolled her eyes. This kid was more like Lexa every time she saw him. She grabbed her sleeve, touching the wetness that soaked into the fabric. Even with dulled steel, she noted, Aden hit hard enough cripple. She switched her grip, moving her sword from her right to her left hand and took a few practice swings. 

The first  of her strikes,  Aden parried with a familiar  _ clank _ , but with the second , he jumped away and returned her swipe with a jab of his own. Anya turned to the side and took a step back. She drew the blade across her body weaving under his arm and towards the leather chest plate, boots dragging against the ground and kicking up the dirt as she  rushed towards him. He responded by jumping back, his entire body bending out of the way. 

There was, in truth, a beauty to Aden’s talents. What he lacked in and experience he made up in speed and wit. He saw with his eyes, heard with his ears, felt with his skin. Which was something only the most experienced warriors knew how to do. He wasn’t easily tricked, and combining that with his youthful agility and stamina, he became a dangerous opponent. But, there was a cockiness about him that Anya didn’t like it. 

Aden steadied himself again and wiped the sweat from his brow. He was protected against her blunt sword by studded boiled leathers, but the protection was also a training mechanism. Being weighted down my so much metal, the weighted armor served as a way to condition the young Flamekeeper. It did occasionally throw him off balance, but the weight was not nearly enough to slow his movements to a level that would hinder him. In fact, Anya knew this would only condition him to out speed even the quickest of his opponents.

In spite of the protection and dulled swords, both she and Aden bore their fair share of cuts and bruises. Anya had the slice on her arm, a lump on her calf she knew would bruise, several purple finger joints, and what felt like a broken rib, but Anya wore no armor, and a wielded a singular sword nothing like the twins she was accustomed to. Aden, with his leathers and armor was arguably not in any better shape than she was. His hair was wet and sticky with blood where he had wiped his brow, several fingers were bleeding and he walked with a slight limp. Occasionally he would wrap an arm around his side, and puff through a few staggered breaths, but Anya knew she couldn’t have caused more than bruise after knocking the wind out of him.

Aden stood still, keeping his blade between them . Until now, he had been so wrapped around defense,  keeping Anya’s strikes away and  struggling to keep his balance . Anya saw now a glint in his eyes, that look that Lexa used to give her right before doing something stupid and brave . 

Aden lunged , his sword cracking against hers.  As his sword flung back from the impact, he grabbed it with two hands and brought the sword down with  all his strength.  Anya jumped back , the steel serpent following her. She brought her slender blade  to clash against his but he was quick to strike again. He came from the right, then the left, then low. Something struck her leg and a flash of pain overwhelmed her as she fell to one knee. 

He stood over her, steel wet and red. He flicked the blade and raised it to chest. “I win,” he grinned. 

Anya spat, but as her eyes trailed from the ground to Aden, she laughed. He looked at her with a curious glare. The blade that touched her chest dropped and hung limp in a weakened grip. 

Seizing the opportunity, she dug her  nails into the groubd , shifted her weight and shot forward with a vicious lurch. Her arm slammed into his ribs and Aden gave a voiceless cry as her weight hurdled them into the ground. She shoved her hand onto his chin, pushed his face back and placed  the tip of her sword over his exposed throat. 

He laid  there for a moment, motionless , his sword  clattering to the ground just out of reach. “ Fine ,” he  gurgled . “I yield.” He spoke as if the word were poison. To  most of the twelve clans, it was poison. 

“Do you know the difference between you and my second?” 

Aden shook his head. 

“Do you know the difference between myself and Indra?” 

He shook his head again. 

Anya sheathed her sword and pulled Aden to his feet. “It’s her,” she said, pointing to the statue of the goddess that watched over their training grounds. It was  an  old  statue, carved by a Stonemason serving under the first commander. There were cracks  and chips in the statue,  but her likeness remained same. “What has the commander taught you of strength?” 

Aden  began to peel the leathers away . He was bruised, batter, and worse for wear than any sparing session she had seen him undergo with Lexa.  She realized the Commander may not approve of the force, but it was lesson he needed, and Anya was going to make sure he learned.  “Heda says we must be as wise as we are strong.” 

“The commander must be as wise as she is strong,” Anya corrected. She placed  her practice swords on a wooden rack guarded by a large ranger and tossed  Aden’s  practice leathers into a woven basket. “We must be wiser.” 

The guard handed her a wooden pail of water and as she took her fill to quench her thirst Aden said, “If I were stronger I would have won.” 

“No,” Anya shoved the bucket into his chest. “If you would have yielded when I first told you to you , I would have told you that if you adjusted your grip, you would have been able to disarm me completely without losing your footing or over exhausting your stamina.” 

Anya drew one of her  twin  swords from the double sheath on her back. The blades were different from the practice swords: shorter, slender and light with a sharpened edge on only one side. They were perfect for her, but for Aden. 

Aden showed her his grip. 

“You hold your sword like Lexa,” Anya told him , observing the placement of the weapon in his palm. “Don’t.” She moved his fingers, tightening and loosening his joints until he his grip had been entirely refocused. 

She swung at him and Aden stepped back as he raised his sword to catch the bite of steel. There was a heavy clash, a ring of steel that echoed across the training grounds. It was Anya’s heaviest hand yet, and Aden held his ground. 

He pushed back. She swung again and t he swords clashed. “How does that feel?” 

Aden stepped back and looked at the grip. “Good,” he told her, looking up. “I feel stronger.” 

“Stronger, yes. But also, wiser.” Anya sheathed her sword. “Where others fall, we survive. There are other ends to our means that don’t involve sword play, remember that. You have a duty to the Commander, not to a clan. Do you understand?” 

He gave a hesitant nod after several seconds of thoughtful deliberation. “I think so.” 

“Good.” It was not often that Anya was around the young second. There were many things he had yet to learn and Lexa simply did not have the time to fulfill his needs herself.  The era of peace was a heavy crown – she knew it would be – but it still took its toll.

She looked up at the sun. By now, her commander was chest deep in politics. Listening to squabbles over chickens and borders. Anya hated the politics. She always preferred to fight. Aden was different. It didn’t take a genius to recognize why Aden had become Lexa’s Flamekeeper. He had a mind for ruling, not for killing. A useful skill that could bring the coalition into true peace. “We’ll break here for the day. I’m sure the commander has need of you in the throne room.” 

* * *

It was an eighty floor climb to the top of the commander’s tower. On a good day, particularly a good day in her youth, she could scale the tower in a half hour. Now it took her almost twice as long. There was, of course, a lift, but it was slow and Anya would rather  make the climb herself anyway.

Aden kept pace with her, trailing a few steps behind as they steadily climbed the tower. He was quiet for a long time, only their boots echoing off the stone walls to fill the silence of the climb until he finally asked, “How many steps are there?” He had stopped midway up a flight and looked over the railing to the ground. “Do you know?” 

“1,446.” She leaned against the railing. “I counted.” 

Aden started up the steps again. “I tried to count once.” 

“What’d you get?” 

“1,427.” 

The steps were just part of the venture. The Throne room itself was still a ways off. Down a hallway, and then another, past several guards and through large oaken double doors that moaned with defiance every time they were pushed open. Past that was large standing room, a carpeted aisle and three more long stone steps. Only then would you find the throne. Lexa had spent  eight years atop that throne, and Anya still wasn’t used to the sight of her sitting there. 

Lexa  sat high upon  a throne of wooden serpents that reached to the stars, bathing in the light of the sunset that filtered through the red curtains and painted the room with red. It was the throne where the commander of blood would give their wisdom, and their judgement, until the end of their days. But, Lexa seemed to have no end of days in sight. Before her, the longest reigning commander lasted five years past their Ascension Day. Her own commander lasted three years after their Ascension. Lexa had lasted longer than the two of them combined. 

Years ago, when Lexa first took the throne, she sat uneasy upon the great seat. As if the gods had made a mistake in choosing her. Now she sat sprawled and lazy, one - foot dangling over the armrest while she fiddled with a knife as if she had earned it.  _ No _ _ , _ Anya thought,  _ because she  _ had __ _ earned it _ . Lexa had earned every success, every victory, every year that she sat at the seat of the highest authority. Most of all she had earned the title of ‘Heda’. She had earned all this and more, and yet Anya still saw the small hellion, the wildling from the trees, the girl who became her second, the girl who dreamed of peace. 

Lexa looked bored, and hardly seemed to notice when the large oak doors creaked shut behind her  and  Aden. She didn’t even raise her eyes to meet him as he quietly took a seat behind her and next to Titus. She kept her attention forward; overlooking villagers and warriors that filled the room. Small children and old women, younger women with babes still on the breast, stout men with jewelry on their fingers and scarred men with bones in their ears. 

Addressing the commander was a thin man with a long beard accented by a silver tassel. His head was shaven and there were intricate tattoos around his forehead and down to the base of his scalp. With him were two boys no more than  ten with little more than a handful of purple marks on their temples between them.  He was complaining about something, Anya hadn’t tuned in enough to know what, but she was a pleased to see Lexa lift her gaze just enough to see her as she shuffled through the back the throne room. 

Heda gave a long sigh, eyes flickering back down to the three before her. “Titus,” she said after a moment. “Please, recount Jorin’s story so that my second can place his ruling.” 

The man named Jorin stepped forward. “Heda, I don’t think– “ 

“Jorin is here on behalf of his village,” Titus cut. “Seeking permission for these two seconds to begin training as rangers here in the capital.” 

“What qualifies them become rangers?” Aden’s question was in response to Titus, but his voice rang down the hall for the man named Jorin to answer. 

“They are strong,” Jordin grabbed one of the boys. “This one killed reapers. The other knows how to hit someone and make their limbs sleep.” 

“Why would the Shadow Valley give up strengthening their own clan? What does sending strength have to  the capital do to  benefit  you so much that you would send them here ?” 

“The only warriors with a war to fight are rangers. These boys were bred for war, trained for it – but look at them.” He grabbed the other boy by the jaw and twisted his head to display the purple tattoos. “Hardly marked. Hardly respected. Your commander took that from them. It’s only fair that she gives them what they’re owed.” 

Lexa cast a glance towards Aden and then back to Jorin. Anya thought they had flickered in her direction, but before Lexa could leave a lingering glare, they were settled on the dispute before her where Jorin  twitched with impatience. His frustration had multiplied several times since Anya arrived but , angry or not , there was a reason Jorin had been sent to deliberate this request. Lexa too, must have known that, because she appeared to be relishing his pained swallows and tensed fists as he awaited young Aden’s judgement. 

She shouldered through the standing crowds, almost missing the empty seat that was her own next to Titus. At least there, she could sit. Most weren’t permitted a seat. They had to stand , and keep standing for however long it took for their needs to be addressed – if they were addressed at all. But , Anya had a chair , and  so  she  could sit if she so pleased. That chair , with his polished wooden arms and deep plush cushioned bottom, almost seemed appealing now.  But, she’d settle for leaning against the wall If it meant avoiding the work that awaited her there. The gods would surely have wanted to damn them all if Lexa were to ask for Anya’s judgement. 

But she didn’t ask Anya: she asked Aden. 

Aden stood, his chin high and his  bloody fingers in tight little fists with  dirt and sweat speckled across his skin. He almost looked like a commander then . Anya saw his nostrils flair as he took in a breath, and with his very best  commander’s  voice he said, “Given the state of peace we’ve experienced  these past years, I don’t believe the Commander owes you anything.” Aden’s eyes scanned the room. “Who’s to say those seconds would have even survived this long if there had been another war. Perhaps between Shadow Valley and the  Broadleaf? I’ve been told tension is high on your borders. No doubt the commander’s coalition has kept these two from getting their heads put on spikes.” 

Just then, only for a moment, the shadow of a smile twitched at the corner of Lexa’s lips. 

“That being said,” Aden looked to his commander and then back to the seconds. “Reapers have become something of a problem with the mountain dead. I will have our Rangers evaluate them and assess their skills. Should they be of use, they can begin training in the capital.” 

_ Fair enough _ , Anya thought. 

A guard came to  escort the boys and Jorin through the throne room and the entire standing audience seemed to shift as the next person came forward, obstructing Anya’s view. She thought about moving, but when a gruff voice carried over the thickets of people , she changed her mind. She didn’t need to see to know who was addressing the commander now. 

“Please forgive my Queen mother for not asking this of you herself.” The people shifted again and Anya could see Roan bowing before Lexa;  in stark contrast to the Roan of Azgeda Anya had witnessed only a few nights ago. He wore simple clothing. A white tunic over light grey pants with tan leather boots lined with grey fur. He had several pelts hanging from where his sword should be, and instead of his crown of thorns, Roan wore a thin silver chain around his neck with a piece of bone hanging ornate just below his collar.  “There are pressing matters that required her attention back in Azgeda.” 

Lexa seemed indifferent to Roan’s approach. Anya was almost certain that she was happy to have the Ice Queen out of her city, but she didn’t let that show to the Prince. She wondered if Nia had made a habit out of sending Roan to do her bidding. It didn’t seem unlikely given the tension between the commander and the queen. But, Nia coming to ask anything of the Commander was something Anya never expected to witness. 

Roan rose to his feet. “I’ve come to request open borders between Azgeda and Trikru.” 

Lexa sat more upright. His request must have piqued her attention, even if she had controlled her expression to remain as still as stone – just like she had taught her all those years ago. It was a useful little trick she had spent years teaching her young commander to master. Lexa had always been far too easy to read.  She watched Lexa’s fingers  drum against the arm of her throne as she pondered the prince’s words and Anya could practically hear  the Commander’s train of thought: 

_ What’s wrong with the Path of Fire?  _

_ What business does the queen have in Trikru?  _

_ What game is she trying to pull?  _

Lexa’s brow creased and her jaw twitched with tightness, fingers still tapping the throne. She was thinking about the Sky People, Anya knew, about Clarke. 

“What reasoning did your Queen  mother  provide for this request?” 

Roan kept his head bowed. “Heda, the  Path of  Fire would add nearly a week of travel. It is a safe route, I don’t doubt that, but it is not wares and traders we are trying to move. In an attempt to better our relations with the other Clans in this time of peace, we have arranged an exchange of seconds between Azgeda and the Rockline. It would be in the best interest of the both clans and the seconds in transit if travel was not impeded by a detour to Polis or a strict, unbreakable passage.” 

Anya  gave Roan a  measured look and  Lexa  did the  same. “And what of the Blue Cliff that resides between Trikru and Rockline?” 

“Blue Cliff has agreed to host the exchange in their capital. Both Clans have already been granted open borders for the exchange in an act of good will, Heda.” 

Again, Lexa adjusted in her seat. She had her thumb tucked under her chin and her forefinger curled over her lips. Her eyes were almost squinting, piercing across the room and into Roan as she thought. Behind her, Titus held  a quizzical look  equal  to what Anya knew was her own while Aden sat with an expression that mimicked his teacher. No one moved. The quiet whispers that usually floated through the standing room had died off, leaving the tapping of Lexa’s nails on the wood of her throne the only sound to  sing through the hall. 

Commander Lexa leaned forward, hands grasping the arms of the throne. “Azgeda has been the enemy of Trikru for centuries. What makes you think  Indra would allow your warriors passage across the greensroad?” 

“We are allies now,” said Roan. “There  have been no wars between the clans of Trikru and Azgeda since the birth of the Coalition. We have proven our loyalty to the Commander’s peace and fortified that loyalty during the war against the mountain, where my men and  my women fought and died for you on your homelands. We have brought you more  reaper heads than even your own forces and provided the capital with the finest steel workers and stone masons from our own royal city  to  strengthen that trust .” 

Lexa rose to her feet.  “Do you have anything else to say to me?“ 

“Only that if you truly practice the peace you preach, you will see this as an opportunity to  bring an end  to a rivalry as old as the gods themselves.” 

A murmur swept through the audience as Roan bowed his head and dropped again to his knee. Lexa looked to Aden, and then to Anya.  _ There is a reason Roan is here instead of his mother, or even  _ _ their  _ _ First warrior _ , she wanted to  scream the moment Lexa’s  eyes locked with her own , but the words didn’t come and Lexa’s  eyes  were gone as fast as they had come to her. 

Anya stepped forward. She pushed past one of  the  lesser warriors and then a high warrior of Podakru. She wanted to question Roan herself, she wanted to – but it was too late. 

Lexa raised her hand, silencing the chamber at once and let her judgment ring through the halls of the Tower. “I will grant you open borders on the condition that my  Flamekeeper , Aden kom Trikru, my predecessor’s  Flamekeeper , and five rangers of their choosing accompany your caravan throughout the exchange.”

Behind the Commander, Aden looked shocked, his eyes round and wide like the moon. He shared a look with Anya and Anya shared it with Lexa, who only looked at them with hardened eyes and no hints of what she had planned for them. But, that stare was nothing compared to the frostbitten steel that were the eyes Roan kom Azgeda who had let his gaze linger on Anya for a moment too long. 

Roan redirected his eyes back to Lexa then and dropped to a thankful kneel “Azgeda accepts these terms, and thanks you for your consideration.”

Lexa dismissed the prince, waving her hand with a hint of agitation masked under the authority of the action. After that, Lexa left the decision in the hands of Aden who, with steeled jaw and straight spine, did his best to command in Lexa’s place. Anya observed the indifferent glaze over her eyes as she toyed with a knife, wondering just what it was that caused Lexa to shut down the way she did, but knew better than to bring attention to it now. Best that the others saw a bored commander and not an emotionally turmoiled one.

Anya resolved to speak to Lexa that night, but she never got the chance. Aden had come to her stating that he had selected their rangers and he expected them all to leave at first light for Azgeda to meet the caravan. From there it was one task after another, and each time Anya found a few moments to track down the Commander, she was nowhere to be found. 

Something, Anya knew, was happening; she didn't know what, but her gut twisted the way it would before a great fight – the way it did on the eve of war. She knew Lexa was, without a doubt, the most cunning and insightful commander to rule their lands. But, as Anya had experienced time and time again, Lexa was a fool when it came to her ideals and her dreams and a heart-eyed idiot when it came to strong women with dreams of peace. And as much as Anya wanted to kick down the doors and corner her commander until she forced an explanation out of her, she did not hold the authority to do so. If Lexa did not wish to be found, there would be no finding her. It was as simple as that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter 4 is Octavia's perspective so we're finally seeing Arkadia, and we get more info on Clarke so i hope you stick around for that~


	4. Octavia

Octavia had nearly forgotten what he looked like. 

His skin was crisp and burnt, peeling in places where the sun had lingered too long. There were scars on his back and forearms that shredded through his tattoos like claws from a panther. He had lost so much muscle that the clothing that once clung tightly to his skin now hung loose and baggy. His eyes, once soft and warm, were empty and dark with circles. He looked nothing like the man who left, but what came back was every bit the man she remembered as much as he wasn’t at all. 

She felt hollow. She should be feeling something, she knew, but it had been so long. A ghost sat before her now, and all she felt was the void it had left her with all those years ago – aching. She feared that all her tears had been long lost to mourning. That whatever was left of them had been stolen with the pieces of  him that did not make it back. She touched him; fingers trailing down gaunt cheeks. He raised his head to meet her gaze and Octavia saw the ashes of a flame long extinguished in his eyes. 

But, when he touched her, as gentle as he did on their  first night , everything she had ever lost came rushing back. 

They had kept him in  an  isolated intensive care for nineteen days. During that time, Octavia had kept her mind so preoccupied that she had almost numbed herself completely to the idea of Lincoln returning back to her at all. But now, as tears  streamed down her cheeks and her fingers trembled  against his skin  as he kissed her, Octavia realized she had never been so filled with emotions as she did in that singular moment. 

"I missed you," she found herself saying.  And s he did miss him. She missed him every moment of every day for so long. 

He told her, "I missed you too," with as much strength as his voice would allow. It was hardly more than a gruff whisper, strained and weak. He took his thumb and pulled the tears away from her face and pressed his forehead against her own where they sat together in silence for what felt both like an eternity and an instant. 

She  reminded herself that she  couldn't stay. They had told her she could only see him for a few moments, or not at all. She had chosen the  former, and when the doors opened with a loud hiss, Octavia knew that her time had passed and she had to take her leave. 

"I'll be back soon," she promised, stepping  back so that she could look at him for as long as possible. "I promise." Lincoln nodded and the doors closed between them. She watched him lean back in his cot, as the exhaustion took him, as the dreams consumed him again. She hoped they were good ones. 

“Whatever it was he’s been through,” Abby told her as she joined Octavia by the window. “Lincoln is strong enough to overcome it.” She was trying to reassure her. It was the motherly thing to do. 

“I know,” Octavia  said, even though admitting it made her feel weak. Admitting anything made her feel weak, but she knew she was not done with admission just yet. She rubbed away the  trail  of wat  left by tears  on her face with the back of her hand and ripped her eyes away from the cot . “That’s not what I’m afraid of.” 

“What are you afraid of?” 

“Why  don’t you worry about your own daughter instead of dotting over me for once,” Octavia snapped, venom infused into each syllable that passed her lips. She meant it to hurt , and by the look on Abby’s face, she had done precisely that. 

Octavia pushed past the  doctor and out of  medical. The last of the electronic doors shut behind her, and Octavia threw her head to the sky ; finally, able to breathe again. Only a portion of Alpha station was in working order:  medical , the cold storage,  the security system and a scarce number of home units. The rest of the station had been stripped and repurposed to construct buildings and shelters  of every shape and size under the sky.  What parts of the  station  did still function, always  filled the air with  buzzing, humming , groaning and moaning and crying. She hated it. She liked it better when she was as far away from the  metal monster that was Alpha Station as possible. 

She had been told that,  if Lincoln  did not recover soon , they would transfer him to the mountain facility. There, they said, he could have the care he needed to  get back to his old self. Octavia knew the mountain was a superior facility, despite the technology within being – as Raven called it – caveman tech.  Unlike the station, the mountain was fully operational. It had a power generator and heat which protected them during the first winter. It had a protein lab that recreated 21 st century animal products such as beef and cheese, three greenhouse farms that replicated different growing climates from the late 20 th century, water filtration, waste management and a medical facility that rivaled the ark on its best day. But, Octavia hated the Mount Weather facility, and Lincoln – she knew – would hate it even more. 

A man named Charles Pike had been placed in charge of the  mountain two years  earlier after he and several other ark survivors gathered at the red beacon. It was decided that, as a man who had survived hell, he was best suited to defend the acquired facility. Octavia didn’t agree. All of them had survived hell, but only some of them were strong enough to bury their past and move forward with their lives. Most of those people we’re delinquents. The good, law abiding citizen who had banished them here – they were weak.  And the leaders they appointed were even weaker.

Jaha lost his mind, Kane lost his confidence, Abby lost her child, Pike lost common sense. Their fearsome foursome. A wonder, Octavia thought as she marched across the dirt, that they hadn’t all been slaughtered yet . 

It was Bellamy’s idea to repurposed the ark. He built walls, towers, bunkers and forts. It was Raven who turned scrap into treasures. They attached solar panels to spotlights, turned garbage into bullets and bombs, made old things work again. It was Octavia who trained their soldiers to fight, Miller who taught them how to shoot. Monty who got crops to grow and  computers to talk to each other and  Jasper  who  made the best damn hooch on the ground. They ran this place – the hundred. Even if no one wanted to admit it. 

Octavia scaled an erect metal beam that was the groundwork for a central watch tower to where a black rope was fashioned and secured, leading a zip line trail to front gates. The zip lines were the collaborative brain child of her brother and Monty’s construction. There were ropes scattered all across the forest and throughout the walls as to make for fast and efficient travel across their acquired territory. Octavia loved them. She loved them because it was the fastest way out of Arkadia; somewhere she never wanted to be in the first place. 

She hit the ground with roll and continued her march. “Open the gates,” she said, eyes squinting in the sun. “I gotta get out of this place.” 

“Can’t do that,” a fat, flat-faced guard told her, spitting something black into the dirt. “Orders from the chancellor. We're on lockdown until further notice.” 

Octavia raised a brow in challenge. "Does it look like I give a fuck what the Chancellor orders?" She stepped forward, pressing. "There is nothing out there that I can't handle. You know that. Open the gates." 

The guard stumbled back a step, slipping on a loose rock. He looked up to the guards on the wall, one of them wore an officer's patch on his jacket. Then he found Octavia again and shrugged.  “Convince your brother,” he said” Not me.” 

Bellamy turned around on cue. The word ‘brother’ was reserved especially for him; him and a few newborns who did nothing but shit and spit all day and their older siblings who were more or less as useless as the babes themselves. He pulled his visor off his head, loose black curls splaying around him, slick with sweat. At first, he smiled, but when he realized why it was Octavia was here, it quickly fell to a frown. 

"O," he breathed, wiping the sweat from his brow. "How's Lincoln?” 

Octavia wasn’t sure what to tell him. Was he doing well because he was alive? Or was he doing poor because he was a shell of the man he used to be? Was he better, seeing as she was allowed to enter his room? Or was Abby merely letting her have a moment with him because they did not know if he would make it at all? 

She settled with, “The same as yesterday,” and left it at that. 

Her brother climbed down from his post and joined her on the ground. “You said that yesterday. And the day before. And every day for the past two weeks . Didn’t you get to see him today?” 

“I did,” Octavia said. 

Bellamy gave her that stupid smile of his. That stupid, sad smile. The one he made when she was little when she asked him why she couldn’t go to school with the other kids. The one he made when she asked him why he wasn’t eating. The one he made when he knew they were coming for her and their mother. “He’s going to be fine,” he lied . Octavia knew it was a lie. He always lied when he made that stupid face. “You’ll see. Everything will work out.” 

She didn’t feel like pressing him. “Open the gates, Bellamy.” 

“I can’t do that.” 

This time it was Octavia’s turn to frown. “Since when have you ever followed the rules around here?” 

Her brother snapped, “Since the Chancellor gave me the power to make the rules.”  This she knew, was true. Bellamy had somehow gone from a janitor and an attempted murderer to a hero and a member of the Chancellor’s council. The change in respect and his position among the people of Arkadia had also changed Bellamy’s outlook towards the community and the rules they held. Of course, Bellamy didn’t make this rule. He could never command a lockdown, no matter how much power he threw around. A lockdown like this had to come from the chancellor. 

This quarrel she had with her brother – it wasn’t supposed to exist. It had always been her and her brother, backs against the wall, screaming at the world. Now it feels like they have their backs turned to each other , a  heaviness filling the space between them like a wedge. Bellamy found his place among the Arkadian people – people he grew up with. He didn’t have to hide her anymore and he was able to thrive because of it. He fell into his place, adopted  ninety-six other kids who needed him more than she did, and they’ve been clashing ever since.

“You can open the gates and see when I come back,” Octavia said, her voice calm and controlled. “Or you can come looking for me later, and realize there is more than one way out of this city – and I know them all.”

“I know them all too, little sister,” he challenged. “Don’t make my men use force.”

“Your best men,” Octavia stepped forward, challenging. “Betrayed you, couldn’t lay a finger on me, or is so fucked up from following you that the only reason he’d ever pick up a gun again would be to blow his own brains out. And those are the best.” She counted each of them out on her fingers. “So, I'll tell you again: open the gates.” She knew he wasn’t going to budge, but she wasn’t going to back down without a fight either. 

“Sorry, O,” He said, giving her an apologetic look. “I can’t do that.” 

Bellamy had only just begun to pull his visor back down when Octavia spun on her heels and  trudged over to the south armory, a crude building constructed from scraps of the Ark meant to house the defenses of the gate and southern patrol forces. She turned, only to make sure he was still watching her, and dashed towards the wall.

Her momentum propelled her up . She kicked off, spinning around in the air and landing with half her torso atop the armory’s roof. She pulled herself up and crossed the plane to a second, taller rooftop next to the first. Atop that, she centered herself on the roof, analyzed her position, and leapt towards the wall again. Her fingers caught the ledge and she kicked at the structure to help propel her  upward again. She flung one leg over, sat comfortably at the top and found Bellamy’s eyes again before dropping down on the other side.

According to Raven, Skaikru now occupied a little more than a 20-mile radius southwest of what was once Washington D.C., now the capital of Trikru. A good chunk of that border was the scar, which put Arkadia at a strong tactical advantage against any potential invaders. It also meant that no matter how Octavia got through the walls, they would all see her walk away, so she gave them the gift of her middle finger as she left. 

Beyond the tree line, Octavia’s senses were overwhelmed with wet grasses, sticky saps, and earthy aromas. As the familiarity filled her, she felt the tension in her shoulder drain away and her body began to relax. The forest was the only place Octavia ever felt at peace. She knew it as well as any grounder and better than any Arkadian could every dream. She knew which mushrooms would kill her if she ate them and which ones produced a slime that fought infections. She knew the fourth Poison Pine north of The Knife was a great place for setting traps and hunting game in lands that would not disrupt or upset their warrior neighbors that surrounded them on all sides. She even knew the names of each village leader, healer, and elder in Trikru. 

She wasn’t sure where she was going, she just knew she needed to be here; in the forest that felt more a home to her than anything ever had. The iron walls were suffocating and the sorrowful eyes were exhausting. It wasn’t like the forest, it wasn’t like Trikru. And after spending most of her life scurrying through air vents and cavities under the floor boards, Octavia knew she’d never let herself feel captive again.

* * *

The short swords on her back clinked against her leather jacket as she scurried down a slope and onto the main road; a dirt path worn in by foot soldiers, carriages, and horse lords and lit by a trail of covered torches. She looked down the long winding road, where the trees curled around it and the fires fade into the distance. She turned and walked the opposite path, where the road vanished beneath  the  scrap  fort know as Kor. 

Kor was a single tower fort that stood well above the trees and twice the height of the black walls of Arkadia. Built from chiseled stone and salvaged steel, the fort was as much a watchtower as it was a defensive tank, with a great fire tended night and day atop its peak. Manned by seven guards of the Commander’s Ranger forces, Kor was one of many beacons scattered across the twelve clans and Octavia knew each of them by name.

The base of the fort was protected by sharpened steel pikes that stuck out at various angles,  piled a top one another with the last of the spikes reaching Octavia’s chest. There was large oaken double door fitted with iron hinges and metal linked in diamond chains. It had two torches lit on either side of the doors and an archer stationed at small peek hole above it where the tip of an arrow followed  those who approached the  f ort, ready to put a hole in the head of anyone who dared to enter unwelcomed. 

“Octavia Kom Skaikru,” a booming voice called down as she approached. “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you.”

“Why’s that?” she asked as she approached the gates. 

“ Your other half  came back from the dead.”

Octavia crossed her arms. “How do you know that?”

Torik, a hook-nose man with long sand colored curls and beard flecked with red, leaned over the edge of the stone tower. “When someone kills an  inforsa , you hear about it.”

Octavia felt her features squint. She had never heard such a word before. The only thing Lincoln had told them was Clarke was alive and somehow responsible for his rescue: her and his friend Luna of the Boat People. There were no mentions of killing anyone, especially not an inforsa – whatever that meant.

“Never mind that, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got something to show you.” Torik waved her up and disappeared from the  tower’s edge before she could ask what it was he wanted her to see. 

Octavia wasn’t much in the mood to put up with the rangers of Polis on a good day. She especially didn’t want to put up with any of them now. She wanted to clear her head. Forget about everything. Pretend life was simpler. Octavia  grimaced . Life was never simple, and she was never going to forget. 

She pulled at the door, letting it groan as she yanked it away from the stone tower, and slipped inside before it slammed shut behind her again. The base of the fort had little more than crates of supplies and a roaring fireplace. There were two wooden chairs – neither looked all that comfortable – and a stairwell of stone that spiraled up to the higher floors where Torik waited to meet her on the top floor with two other men.

“Octavia,” The smallest of the three gasped with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

Octavia pulled up a chair, sat in it backwards, and crossed her arms over the back. In front of her was a large war council table where a hand drawn map of the twelve clans lay pinned by knives and littered with wood carved pieces that resembled houses and towers. She picked up the black star shaped piece and examined it with a lame, uninterested gaze. “Needed air,” she said.

“You should be back at the sky city celebrating,” he said. “if I we’re you, I'd be celebrating on his cock day and night – till my ass got raw and my legs stopped working – ow!” The star shaped piece bounced off his forehead. 

“Shop op, Wans,” Octavia demanded. “I don’t want to hear it today.”

“When do you ever?” Wans rubbed his head. “Damn that teacher of yours. Your aim’s better than mine now.” 

“Her aim’s always been better than yours,” The third guard, Regas, jabbed. 

Torik picked the star shaped piece off the ground and wacked Wans across the backside of his head as he set the piece back into place on the map. “Leave her alone, Wans. You know as well as I do this is no time for a good mounting.” He turned to Octavia and leaned one arm on the  table and with the other he  reached across it and plucked a white, three-pointed crown from the map. “Now, tell me: what did your teacher tell you of t he l ate King of Azgeda, Octavia kom Skaikru?”

“Only that he died in a war twenty years ago,” Octavia recalled with a dull indifference.

“Twenty - two years ago,” Regas corrected. “After killing two Commanders.”

“Almost three,” Wans added.

Octavia cocked her head to one side and looked to Torik. He was glaring at the wooden crown, twisting it between his thumb and forefinger as he deliberated his words. He sighed, fingers wrapping around the piece as he slammed a fist onto the table. “Almost three,” he repeated, voice scarce more than a whisper. The crown slipped from his fingers. “I want to show you something,” he said pointing to the map with a thick finger. “You see that piece? The white  horse?” 

Octavia nodded.

“That piece has been straddling the border for years,” he said.  “ Now , it  finally  crossed over into Trikru territory.”

“Ice Nation broke the treaty?”

Torik shook his head. “Commander Lexa opened the borders between Trikru and Azgeda.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Apparently it’s supposed to be a symbol of trust.  We got word that a caravan would be crossing over to Blue Cliff - off the Path of Fire.” The ranger  drew a line across the  map with his finger before pressing down on a spot between TonDC and the Arkadia. “I suggest you tell your people to keep their guns on their side of that wall, unless they want the Ice Queen using those holes in her men as a reason to start a war.”

Octavia should have thanked him. It should have been the first thing out of her mouth. She should have spun on her heels and marched right back to her trigger - happy city and demanded that Bellamy pull his men from the walls. She didn’t do that.

Instead, she asked, “What about Anya?” 

Regas frowned. “As far as we know, she’s still in the capital.”

“And Indra?”

“Back in TonDC,” said Wans.

Octavia pushed away from her chair and reached for her swords. “Then, I’m going to TonDC.”

“Not so fast,” Torik said as he wrapped his hand around hers and forced her blades back in their sheaths. “There is one more thing I want to show you.” 

He waved for her to follow and Octavia found herself descending the stone steps from which she came. On the ground floor, Torik walked over to one of the back walls where Wooden boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling and began to pull them away. Behind them was a door, oaken and barred with Iron like the double doors to the Fort itself, but of a smaller scale. It pushed open with a defiant wail and presented another set of stone steps on the other side.  Tor ik grabbed a torch from the walls of the ground floor and motioned for her to follow him down the dark, basement steps.

“We found her a few days ago,” he explained as they descended. “I was going to take her to the Commander, but,” his voice trailed. “Well, you’ll see for yourself.”

At the bottom of the stairwell, through strained and squinted eyes, Octavia could see figure laying atop a bed of furs. He offered her the torch and with firelight to guide her, Octavia dared to venture closer.

Labored breathing, weaker even than Lincoln’s greeted her ears as she kneeled over the furs. In the corner of the room was discarded bandages, shredded clothing, and a blood - soaked cloak mostly intact. There was a leather belt and a dagger sheath, but no glint of a weapon from what Octavia could find. Bringing the flame across the room, Octavia scanned over a makeshift healing box: littered with jars and  pouches  and strange colored leaves that made no sense to her, leaving a scattered trail to the wounded woman upon the fur bed. What wasn’t covered by woolen blanket had been wrapped in bloodied bandaged cloth or covered by hair that sparkled gold under the firelight. 

“Where did you find her?” Octavia asked, kneeling over the woman. She touched her cheek, sticky with blood and ointments and let her touch trail up the woman’s face to where her forehead rest, slashed and bandaged. She was hot. So hot, she felt like fire wrapped in skin. 

“Ruiz found her holed up in an acid den on his way back from the capital,” Torik told her. “Not sure where she was trying to go, but she didn’t make it. I was told the den smelled worse than the dawn after a battle.”

“Smells like death now,” Octavia noted. 

“That’s the infection,” he told her. “She won’t make it here another night. And if she does, she won’t make it past that. Not with Azgeda passing through.”

Octavia turned her gaze. “What does Azgeda want with Clarke?”

“The same thing all of Lexa’s enemies want with her.” Octavia didn’t understand what he meant, but she knew better than to ask. “You have to take her home.”

Octavia grimaced at the thought. “Why would I do that?”

“She is the leader of your people.”

“No,” Octavia protested. “She’s not. She’s not the leader of anyone.” She pushed herself to her feet and turned her back on Clarke. “Clarke has only ever been good for one thing: ruining lives. I’m not taking that back to Arkadia.”

“If you don’t take her, she’ll die.” Torik argued, his voice pleading.

“She already died,” She said. “Four years ago.” Octavia shouldered past Torik and made for the stairs.

Behind her, the Ranger roared with frustration. Something reached out from the darkness and grabbed the sheaths of her twin swords. She was thrown back, crashing down into the room she had tried to leave behind. Pain hammered against her elbow as she slammed into the stone floor and her head hit something so hard it felt like her skull had split in two. She rolled over, pushed herself up on her knees, but Torik was waiting for her with her own sword pointed at her throat.

“You are as stupid as you are strong. And more selfish than you were the day you were cut.” Octavia unconsciously touched the scar of her cut as he jabbed the blade towards her raised red mark. “Do you have any idea what would happen if her power went to someone else? Someone far more menacing than the Sky Girl afraid of her own shadow would bring an end to the coalition. Your people would die a death more horrible than being eaten alive by reapers or melting in the fog. She has to survive. For your people, and mine.”

Octavia's mouth fell agape but not a single word came to tongue. She had never seen Torik – or any grounder – act this way. Every warrior of the coalition she had ever known kept their emotions so close to their chest it seemed as though they didn’t have emotions at all. And yet, Torik stood over her – slashing the air with her sword – with fear in his eyes and anger on his tongue. 

“I don’t think she’ll survive that long,” Octavia said after a long while, her face grim. “I’ll need a horse.” 

“It's yours then.” He handed her the sword, content with the conditions. “Just get her out of here.”

With Regas and Wans’ help, Octavia was fitted with strong twin-faced stallion, a small bag of whatever remained of Clarke’s things, and the unconscious woman seated in front of her. She rested Clarke’s head against her shoulder and shifted gently in her saddle as Torik guided them out of the small stable. 

“I have to send word to the capital about this,” he told her. “But I’ll wait to send a messenger until I know you’re safe at the Sky City.”

“I know,” Octavia said. 

“Keep her, and your people, inside those walls. And tell no one of her power.” He handed her the reigns and Octavia nodded. “Ride hard, Octavia kom Skaikru.”

She didn’t know what he meant by Clarke’s power, but at this point, she didn’t dare to ask. Instead, she clicked her heels into her horse and took off towards the Black Gates. Clarke’s head bobbed against her shoulder as she rode, her ragged breath almost impossible to hear over the comping of horse hooves in the dirt. “Stay alive long enough to get home, Clarke,” she found herself saying. “I want to see this power of yours.”


	5. Lexa

They had called her “Lexa the Ruthless”, but that was before. Now, they called her “Lexa the peaceful” or “Lexa the Forgiving”. 

Neither were meant as compliments.

The first time she heard it, she was shopping for spices down in the markets. A stout man with a mustache so long it danced in the mud had called her “Lexa the Peaceful” not ten feet away. She thought it might have been a compliment. She thought they saw her truce with the Sky People as a power move that benefited  them all  as well as their peace with Azgeda had. But the man, and all those around him, had laughed. Of course, they didn’t know she was there – Lexa did not often do her own shopping – but the sting  hurt her all the same. 

It only got worse as time went on.

Her people continuously spoke about her behind her back; whispers in the shadows, pointing and gaping at the Commander who solved her problems with kindness instead of swordplay. But, Lexa never addressed it. No one ever said anything of the sort to her face. No one dared to challenge her or her rule. Her reputation as ruthless was remembered, respected. Even if the winds of gossip disagreed.

The subtle scrutiny  became more prominent after she had opened the borders between Trikru and Azgeda. Her days became filled with complaints and demands as the rumors spread. People began to assume they could assert some level of dominance over her to get their way in the name of peace. And as awful and headache inducing as her days had become, her nights had become much worse.

The other Commanders talked to her in her dreams, screamed at her, filled every moment she had with their voices until she couldn’t tell the difference between them and her own thoughts. She listened to her past selves argue over what needs to be done, each voice louder and more demanding than the last, until she awoke in a cold sweat with her knuckles gripped so tightly in her sheets that  her nails had poked them full of holes. 

_ Poke the Queen full of holes, not your bedsheets. _

She sat in her bed, furs up to her waists while the bare skin of her torso prickled from the kiss of cool air and the touch of the pale, silver  touch of moonlight.

_ Poke the Queen full of holes, not your bedsheets.  _ The words stuck to her.  _ Before the  _ _ Death Bringer _ _ awakens. _

“ Death Bringer ” was not unfamiliar to Lexa. She had heard of it plenty of times growing up in the forests under Anya’s tutelage from traders , warriors , and nomadic travelers. They never spoke to her about it — not directly —  and Anya always silenced the subject as  soon as it had been mentioned , so she never heard more than the name .  And as Lexa grew older, questions and ponderings grew fewer and further between .  “ Death bringer ” was as lost from lips as it was lost from the world. 

She wished Anya were here now. 

The tower had grown quiet in the days following her decision to allow Azgedans into Trikru lands. Many of her best rangers were across the forest now, Anya and Aden among them. The mornings witnessed no songs of steel in the courtyard,  no hammering of mail or the mocking laughter of the endless cat catching competition. Even the seconds were taken off to one task or another , and the pigeons had grown plump and cocky in their absence : so much that one of Lexa’s handmaids had to shoo the birds away from her windowsill three separate times while brushing and braiding her hair.

“Stupid things,” she had fumed. “I heard the  orphans catch birds and bring them to the pot in the Low. They say a pigeon gets you a bowl of stew and a slice of day-old bread. I’d wager pigeons fat as those would fetch them two bowls of that stew. Maybe even three.”

The perpetual stew , better known as the pot,  was a reddish - brown slop , heavy with salt and cabbage and pigeon – both meat and bone.  Most  of whatever else added to the pot were vegetables and meats stolen and exchanged before they could get caught for theft.  Sometimes you’d find a squirrel or a meaty bone  donated by a butcher , or a pumpkin  just  starting to rot given from the  shop keeps , but  most of the time it was cabbage and pigeon and whatever else was scavenged that day . 

Growing up,  Anya had taken Lexa there several  times and would make  Lexa  submit her kills to the  keepers of the perpetual stew. Beaver,  deer, cougar, it didn’t matter how large or valuable her  kill was . It  was always surrendered . On multiple occasions the men who tended the stew  offered her a fist full  s ilver, sometimes even gold in exchange for the wild game , but Anya wouldn’t let her accept it. The only reward Lexa ever received for her  kill was a bowl of stew and slice of stale bread. 

As Commander,  Lexa often sent wagons of vegetables to the stew pot . Things that would hold flavor for days or even weeks . Ingredients like  salt rocks,  pumpkin,  garlic, or  s ilver scaled  cod . It was her way of trying to help, even if she hadn’t visited any of the perpetual stew pots since her Ascension Day.

“A bowl  for half a pigeon, more likely,” she corrected, only partially paying attention. “Probably even roast  the other half for you, if you  prepared it yourself . first” She looked across the room to where a wooden tray of cheese ,  peppered jam and freshly baked bread waited for her. She then looked at the goblet clasp between her fingers ; one of her handmaids had brought it to her at first light much like they always had.

“You’ve been to the pot, then. I should have known. Anya was such a good teacher to you.”  Her handmaid tapped her gently on her shoulder , signaling she had finished with the braids . “You should eat, Heda.  It’s far more delicious than pigeon stew, I swear it.”

Lexa  pushed herself to her feet, her  surcoat weighing her down. Her handmaid handed her leather gauntlets embedded with iron  and she pulled them on over  woolen fingerless gloves. She squeezed her right hand into a fist, released it, and then looked to the  sword resting by her bed.  It was crafted especially for her by a blacksmith of Trikru just weeks before ascension. He had told her he began crafting it when she was only two winters old; a gift for saving his life that she was now fit to hold. It was a unique blade. Straight with an edge on only one side and ripples that shimmered like waves where the steel had been folded over and over . It had been modeled after Anya’s swords. Made slightly longer and slightly wider, but with the same guard and pommel and the same serpentine swiftness of her teacher’s twin  blades.  The sword  wasn’t made to  ‘ _ poke someone  _ _ full of  _ _ holes’ _ . It was meant to slash and cut.  Although, she did use the sword to pierce the heart of Gustus . How different was a stab from a poke? 

There were blades meant to jab and stab. Lexa learned how to use one from a sword master in  Delphi. But they were one clan in a dozen.  Most blades were doubled edged, short and fat. Or so long it took two hands to wield. Sometimes, they were narrow at the guard and wide at the tip. Sometimes they curved so  sharp that it became crescent shaped. Most were heavy  at the base  and weak at the tip and only a handful ever displayed the ripples of folded steel like hers did .

She took the sword  and allowed her handmaid to strap it to her left hip.  Then came the paint ; Cool , black  grease  that  covered eyes and trailed jagged down her cheeks . 

“You are dismissed . And take that with you.” Lexa pointed to the wooden slab of cheeses and bread, spun on her heels, and pushed through the double doors of her chambers.

Titus would be waiting for her in the council room along with the First Ranger, the High Firedancer, and the elected First Ambassador of the twelve clans, that she had no doubt. The council had no real power, but it did provide Lexa with insight she could use to better rule the coalition with a fair and just hand – when it worked. Most of the time it was room of bickering and hurt feelings. No two factions of people ever wanted the same things. A tall, crooked nosed warrior whose name Lexa had never bothered to learn always stood sentinel in front of the council door. Like every morning, he would cast a single glance down towards her as she approached before taking a sweeping side step out of her path so that Lexa was able to shoulder through. 

Inside the  walls  were  decorated from floor to ceiling wit h  a deep red paint,  banners and maps of the clans, drawings of wanted faces,  and relics of wars long past.  A  chandelier loaded with large wax candles hung over the center of the room and torches sat lit in the corners  where  the candle light could not reach.  Below the  light fixture was a table ; a singular slab , several inches thick of dark , polished wood .  There were seven chairs placed around it ,  with  four of them  already  occupied  around a mountain of parchment and maps and figures piled  in the center of the table. 

“Please, take a seat, Heda.” Titus waved a hand towards one of the empty seats. “We have much to discuss and very little time.” 

Titus pulsated with perfume, and so  Lexa sat at the far end of the table, next to the High Firedancer and as far away from Titus as she could manage. The Flamekeeper loved being clean . He loved it so much that he hardly went a week without a bath and never a day without the oils and perfumes of his homeland dabbed upon his wrists, collarbone and scalp.  Lexa commanded that Adrik, First of the Commander’s  Rangers, open a window as she took her seat , but even with the morning breeze, she still felt as though she were choking on  Patchouli and Lemon. 

Titus paid her no mind and  took to lighting  a candle, large and red and scentless, as he did every morning upon her arrival. Then, he folded his hands across the table top and sighed deeply. 

“Death Bringer,” Lexa said , her voice curt. Those around the table looked at her with bewilderment. “I want to know what it is. Who it is or ... who it was .” She was doubtful that Adrik was any more aware of Death Bringer than she  was . He  was only one winter older that herself and probably had no more memory of the Red Winter than she did. But Titus was older : he  would remember . And the High Firedancer was older still. She would remember as well.

When it came to  Kraton ,  Lexa did not know. 

Kraton always made Lexa uncomfortable.  A man of over  thirty winters , Kraton had no chin ,  a long neck and even longer fingers that had a habit of drumming on the tabletop.  Most his features were small and close together , except for his eyes, w hich were black and big and  round and  made  much  more prominent by the  green tattoos that wrapped around his face like  s cales.  He was a level - headed man, perfect for a position upon the council ,  but when he spoke his voice was adenoidal and honeyed which made Lexa all the warier.

“The Ice King,” Kraton  explained. “Lived over twenty years ago. Death Bringer, appropriately named, was his sword .”

Lexa looked away, shaking her head.  _ It wasn’t a sword,  _ she wanted to tell them.  _ It was a warrior.  _ She had no reason to fear a sword, even a sword with a name because swords  didn’t have any power : the  people who wielded those swords did. She turned back to  Kraton , his black eyes staring at her.  “Who has the sword now ?”

Kraton shifted in his chair , leaving an opening for Titus  to answer in his place. “Heda, it is believed that Nia of Azgeda holds possession over her late husband's sword.”

Lexa raised a curious eyebrow, but said nothing. Around the table, Adrik had leaned forward with intense interest, the High Firedancer was nodding with closed eyes and a decidedly knowing expression and Kraton continued to drum his fingers on the table. 

“Many assumed that Roan, Crown Prince of the Winter Kingdom, would inherit the sword on his sixteenth winter,” Titus explained. “But Roan carries a  sword of his own design instead .”

“I heard,” Adrik added with an eager excitement. “Roan didn’t want the sword. He refused it and studied under a master blacksmith so that he could forge his own sword with his own blood and sweat in the blade”

“No,” Kraton said. “Nia doesn’t have Death Bringer. She only says she does because it instils fear in her enemies. Roan can’t inherit a sword she doesn’t have to give him. ”

“No,” The Firedancer said, “You’re both wrong. Nia has the sword. This, I know. And when her son asked for what was his by right, she refused him . So , Roan had his own sword crafted  from  steel salvaged from the ruins of the old world . A cursed thing, that sword of his, and very dangerous.”

Titus silenced them all. “Never the less, these are all rumors. Only the Royal Family of Azgeda knows the truth of their King’s sword, and I doubt they would tell anyone at this table  its true whereabouts.” 

The room grew quiet then and the Firedancer touched Lexa’s cheek. “Little spark,” she said with a warm smile. “Why does the sword ail you so?” 

Lexa liked when the old Firedancer called her “little spark.” She had done so for as long as she could remember.  Anya had always called  the Firedancer “Old Red” on account of the Order’s uniforms which were fire red and made from fine silks. Old Red was the High Firedancer when Lexa was little, and even then, she was the oldest person Lexa had ever met. Her real name was “Penelle” and her official title was “High Firedancer Penelle of  T he Order of Fire and Blood”, but she insisted that Lexa call her “Old Red” because it was easier to remember. 

“ It was just a dream,” Lexa dismissed. She didn’t want to worry  her any more than she had to. 

“You used to have dreams about the sword  as a child , don’t you remember?” 

Lexa didn’t.

Old Red let her fingers slide from Lexa’s cheek and laced them atop the table.  “They were always  peculiar, your dreams. The same one, night after night . That was why Anya brought you to the order . ” She closed her eyes, remembering.  “Such a small thing you were. Fierce, yes. But small .”

“It’s only natural that she would have nightmares,” Lexa turned her gaze from the Firedancer back to Titus.  “Heda, we can make time for this later, but there are pressing matters that need  your immediate attention .”

Adrik placed his hands on the table. “The city is strained for guards. We have  too many  blind spots  and not enough bodies  with so many of our rangers out of Polis .”

“ Aden only took  five of you men. I see no problem with that.”

“Heda,” Adrik urged. “ S everal rangers also  moved post to TonDC at Indra’s request. She wanted to do a full  sweep  of her territory for  Enforcers and most of them have  volunteer to stay within the  city  until  Azgedan warriors are back in their own lands. My warriors can’t keep tabs on everyone who enters the city  anymore.  We are breaking up more fights by the day. I fear that before long, we will no longer be able to stop them.”

“Speaking of Azgeda,” Kraton interrupted.  “The other Ambassadors do not agree with your opening of borders between clans without  consent from the  clan leaders or the ambassadors who represent them . They have claimed that you are making decisions that better your own personal agenda rather than making decisions that would best benefit the  coalition.” His long finger nails scraped the table top.  “ I am inclined to agree with them.”

Old Red gave her a searching look, but did not add to the  issues being placed upon the table.  Instead, she decided to take the conversation backwards.  “This dream needs to be taken seriously, Flamekeeper. Commanders do  not dream like you or I. They dream from hindsight and of prophecy.”

“We cannot spare to lose the Commander for a  rite with the  O rder while two Flamekeepers are away , half the guard posted elsewhere, and the death toll within our own walls at an all-time high” Adrik was standing over them now, his voice rising.  He was a slender man,  sharp and agile, but tall , with  a  booming  voice  – perfect for commanding armies on the battlefield.

“ No one said anything about a  rite. Heda Lexa isn’t going anywhere,” Titus reassured. “ As it stands, the Coalition is too fragile to leave in the hands of a weaker warrior. If we intend to avoid all - out war, we must  establish a common enemy and reunite the clans under  merciless  leadership .”

_ And who do you suggest we make our enemy?  _ Lexa wanted to ask.  _ Trikru or Azgeda?  _

There had always been strain on the coalition. Not a day passed since its formation that someone wasn’t threatening or conspiring against  it She knew the game she would have to play if she wanted to keep them from watering the world with blood.  A common enemy was an easy enough reason to quell the brewing storms between clans in the past ;  reapers and mountain men pillaged and slaughtered and raped without  bias , but r eapers alone were never enough to keep the clans united. Their kind were as old as the clans themselves, and have fed on the sick and weak and the ill prepared for as long as anyone could remember. There was  no ridding the world of  reapers , only fighting to outlive  them , and that didn’t require an alliance. 

The only movable piece Lexa had to play was the Sky People, and the  clans weren’t unanimous on their opinions of the invaders from the stars. Marking them as an enemy would enrage Lexa’s closest ally , her own clan .  But , making  the sky people an ally of the coalition would make an enemy of some of the most dangerous and volatile clans under her rule. She could not afford to lose either, and she could not afford to do nothing. At least not for much longer. 

It was one thing to  ignore a clan who did little more than exist.  There was a time when Lexa wondered if the Sky People were capable of anything more than pissing and dying.  But  they killed the mountain, took all the spoils and all the land it  kept.  They survived winter. They built walls. They  grew  stronger with each passing season until Lexa could not ignore them anymore. Not with the strongest of them all – Clarke Griffin  – alive and on the field once again. 

“The coalition  has survived this long because the  clans  wished for peace . I gave  them peace ,” Lexa said at once.  “Mountain Men or  not , peace can be maintained if the clans only  wish for it . ”

“Peace is hard thing to keep,”  Titus said. 

“All our people know is  bloodshed ,”  Kraton added.  “They want a fight. If not together  than against  one another.”

Titus placed both his hands on the table and shot up. “You all are missing the point. Enforcers are reported to have been in Trikru.” He threw a pile of sketched across the table. “What’s worse, is rumor is circulating that you knew about  it and have  chosen not to  warn the other clans .” 

“They’re all dead.” Lexa pointed to the images , knowing full well that Titus didn’t care less about how Lexa handled enforcers when it was a secret well kept. “There's no point in causing a panic over dead enforcers.”

Titus’ face grew dark. “These  _ things  _ are not to be taken lightly. They do not obey our laws or our gods. They’re dangerous, and they cannot be killed so easily. This council is meant to advise you so that peace can be kept . How can we do that if you keep secrets like  this from the other clans !” His fist pounded against the table, shoulders rising and falling as he heaved through a spell of anger. After several moments, he  gave a shaky breath, collected himself, and straightened his robes. “ Enforcers bow to no one  – save one. And that, Heda, is not you. The  next time Indra’s warriors find an  enforcer , your people deserve to know.”

Indra had told her once that Arkadia, with its walls and its guns and its little sun jars that sweep the scar, was stronger than the mountain had ever been, but that the strange metal machines were capable of so much more than death. She only had to prove to them she was not their enemy to see it for herself. Lexa then told this to Titus, but he insisted that the Commander would always be an enemy to the vipers of the sky. And while he did have a point, Lexa had never been fond of Titus, or his advice. He was the Flamekeeper of a Commander during the time of great conflict – Anya called it the downpour– and his views and opinions often reflected a time in which the commander had more enemies than friends. 

“They suspect favoritism,” Kraton  said after a moment . 

“And why would they suspect that?” Lexa snapped her attention from Titus to Kraton,  meeting his accusation with ferocious challenge. 

“Because they know it was the Sky girl who killed him, and Trikru who protects them.” Kraton  propelled upwards in anger , big black eyes staring down  at her “The sky people are our enemy. Their leader has the capability to kill reapers, mountain men, and now enforcers. Her people live in the mountain that killed thousands of our  own. They have cannibalized every enemy they have destroyed and absorbed its power for themselves.  And your people,” he pointed one of his long, boney fingers at Lexa , “betrayed us for them. ”

“The sky people have nothing to do with the state of the  capital or the  C oalition.” Again, Lexa met his challenge. She stood ,  grabbing Adrik by his Tunic and  shoving him out of the way so that nothing stood between them. 

“ The girl does.  If she’s alive, and you do nothing, you’re as good as dead.”

Lexa the  R uthless would have cut him down.  She felt fingers grip  the pommel of her sword , anger building in her tensed jaw. “One more word against me, and you’ll be first.”

Kraton smiled his twisted, thin-lipped smile and seated himself back at the table, satisfied. Around the table, everyone was looking at her with expectation, waiting for her decision. Was she going to be Lexa the Ruthless, or Lexa the Forgiving? 

She decided she was going to be neither.

Her sword scraped along it’s scabbard as she drew the rippled blade , pointing it across the table to Kraton and  letting the razor tip press into his  neck . “Tell your ambassadors that if they have a problem with my leadership, they can challenge me themselves , where the whole coalition will witness what the gods think of my reign.”

“My apologies, Heda.” Lexa whipped her head around to the door where a small framed ranger had slipped through. She was holding a roll of parchment in her hands with an unbroken seal of black wax. “This just came from Kor.” The ranger ran over and pressed the letter into her open palm. There was a curling flame in the black seal – the mark of one of her rangers. 

Lexa’s brow furrowed at the sight of it. Very few knew their letters in the Coalition and even fewer ever utilized it as a form of communication. It was safer to send a messenger, a second, someone to speak the words directly. If a ranger would take the risk and time of a note, there had to be a reason. Determined, she broke the seal and read the parchment twice over. Around the room, she could feel the eyes of the council baring into her, waiting for her to share the news.

Lexa refused to give them the pleasure. She reached across the table and let the note catch fire over the flame of the unscented candle that rested on the table top until the flames reached so high that she had no choice but to drop it onto the stone floor and watch it smolder into ash. When there was nothing more of the letter she looked up from the flecks of red and scorched grey and shook her head. 

“No one is to do anything until I return.” She looked at each of them: Titus, Ardik, Old Red, and then, Kraton last of all. The muscles of her jaw twitched as he stared back at her, smiling. “Is that clear?” 

“Yes, Heda,” Adrik affirmed with a bow before guiding Old Red out of the  room. Titus stared at her for a few moments, as if trying to discover something she wasn’t telling him, but eventually bowed his head and collected his things from the table. Kraton only looked at her, fingers drumming. She  didn’t care to wait for him to  stand down , he had no power that could frighten her . 

Lexa sheathed her sword with frustrated growl. “We will finish this when I get back, and you will no longer hold a seat of honor here.” 

Kraton’s raised his eyebrows, still smiling his twisted smile. “Whatever you say, Commander.”

Lexa spun on her heel and marched her out of the room. She shoved past the hook-nosed guard and into the lift shouting, “prepare my horse,” at anyone around to hear it. She saw her warriors scrambling as the lift began its descent and Lexa began the painstakingly long waiting process in which her mind would undoubtedly begin to run rampant.

Things had not exactly gone Lexa’s way as of late. Between Trikru’s formal alliance with the Sky People,  the Enforcers,  Clarke’s sudden and – in Lexa’s opinion – dramatic return and Azgeda forcing her into a corner with her own words , she was finding it difficult to fix any one problem without digging a deeper hole for another. It was like watching the entire coalition crumble before her eyes. Her entire legacy, holding on by a thread she couldn’t find. 

Allowing Trikrru’s alliance with the Sky People to continue meant condemning the Glowing Forest, who claim that the Sky people have dammed their rivers and pillaged their lands for healing herbs, wood, and other natural resources. It would mean ignoring that Azgeda  have claimed their ruins have been invaded by sky forces. It would mean ignoring everyone’s fears about their move into the mountain. At the same time, telling Trikru that the sky people were an enemy that needed to be destroyed would mean war as an absolute, and while Lexa was confident that her people could beat the Sky in the battlefield, she was not as confident in their ability to invade their two villages. If the sky people knew that they could hole up behind the walls of the Black Gates or within the mountain and pick off her warriors one by one , they would .

Clarke and the Enforcers were a separate matter entirely. Clarke was supposed to be dead , and her being dead was as much a blessing as much as it was a curse; tormenting, but also reassuring. Her conflicting feelings didn’t change when Clarke decided to resurface. Everyone was afraid of Clarke, even her own people. Her power was coveted as much as it was feared . The Mountain Slayer , they called her. Lexa wondered how long that reputation would follow her now that rumors of her victory over the Enforcers had begun to spread. No matter what she did with or to Clarke, someone was bound to be upset and demand vengeance for her decisions.

Then there was  Azgeda who , for all accounts and records, had been loyal and cooperative since the war with the mountain. Lexa had always been suspicious of it, but Azgeda gave her no reason for that to be justified . Which in turn gave them another weapon to use against her , and  that made her more suspicious. Whatever it was they were doing , they didn’t give Lexa any other choice. She had to let it play out.

She reached the first floor with  an echoing thud and made for the tower doors. She expected her horse to be fully prepped by now, and brought to her form the Souther Stables.  The Southern Stables kept four mares and two stallions  trained and bred for use by Flamekeepers and Commanders alone.  Anya and Aden both preferred the stallions, and she knew them both to be long gone on their trek to Blue Cliff, but that did not matter to  Lexa . She had always preferred the mares . 

Of the four, there was  one  horse she prized more than any other. Her coat was a silvery-gray, pale white under the light of the moon and just shy of invisible with no moon at all. She was strong and brave, willing to plunge herself into a spear without hesitation if Lexa commanded her to and more manageable than any  stallion when on the field of battle. She was single-faced, a rare breed, and as beautiful a horse as any Lexa had ever seen. She called her “Stomklad”, as it was not tradition for horses to be given names, but Lexa felt as though there was a distinction about the silver mare - something special that deserved recognition. 

Stomklad was brought to her saddled and packed by the time Lexa reached bottom of the stone steps that splayed out from the Tower doors like  a  frozen river. She brushed her fingers across the mare’s mane, pat her muscled neck, and swung herself over the horse’s backside. 

“Be careful with her,” the Saddle Master warned. “Been some time since she’s been pushed for distance.”

Her horse shifted, taking a few trots to one side and flicked her ears with a snort. Lexa reached down and pat her crest before shifting in the saddle again. She used to ride this horse across the coalition, to the farthest reaches of the flame where battles raged in an endless spiral. She used to ride her into battle, charging  without fear towards her enemies. She was the only one to ever survive  a  war. “I will,” she said. 

Lexa kicked heels into the horse’s side throwing her silver fury into powerful sprint that took her through the city and past the gates. She turned her head as the iron archway of the southern gate disappeared the behind the trees, watching her city as it was swallowed by the forest. 

She pulled up the hood of her cloak and gave the mare her head. She needed to put as much distance between herself and the city as possible. During the conflicts, her Stomklad could put in fifty miles in a day's ride; if she could make thirty now... 

_ No, not Thirty it has to be fifty. _

None of the roads crossed through to the scar or what lie beyond it. The Path of Fire stretched through TonDC and then west to the neighboring clans, while the Greensroad was too winding; wrapping through several small villages and turning away from forbidden ruins of the old world where Enforcers were said to dwell. She could take Rails, but the path was too narrow and rugged for horseback  which made it faster to go the long way around rather than to follow the rails on foot.

When the eternal flame of the Commander’s Tower vanished behind her, Lexa slowed her horse. She needed to travel a great deal of distance before sunset and she would not be able to achieve that if her horse were blown in the first hours of travel. She could trade the horse in one of the villages if she needed a fresh mount, but that would mean her silver mare would become the property of lesser Saddle Master, and after all she had been through with the horse, she’d like to be there for her last ride – be it of old age, or a pike to the chest. Besides that, who was to say the horse she exchanged her for would be any better. Not every warrior was meant to ride every horse. They were as different as the clans, and more often than not a traded horse would never trust the rider like the horse who had been traded away.

She would need to stop at some point and hunt for food and fill her skin with water.  It would be more convenient for her to simply procure salted meats and fresh water form an outpost trader shop along one of the many roads, but Lexa did not want to risk word of mouth interfering with her intentions.  If she were lucky, she could catch a fish downstream and follow the waters south to the Black Gates before rumors twisted against her . It was her best option. The quickest and must discrete path. She just had to make it to the stream first, and she had to do it unnoticed. Getting caught, getting others involved and having their voices heard would only make this harder, but Lexa knew that something had to be done, and soon, because the heart of it all, the center of all of this chaos, was inside those gates.

And  there , maybe Lexa  could make sense of it all. 


	6. Anya

The Azgedan warriors smelled like the ass of a horse and burned flesh. Aden found this strange, as the Azgedan warriors didn’t ride horse, but Anya assured him that elk ass smelled just as putrid as horse. Probably worse. But, no one complained or argued about the smell. Aden’s chosen rangers knew better than to dig up the bones of long dead rivalries between the trees and the ice. 

Anya was to have very little command over the group and who was selected to accompany them. Per Lexa’s instruction, Aden was in charge of the caravan. He selected the rangers, he oversaw the prep of the horses and wagons, he ran the checks, and he commanded the Azgedans sent to cross the Trikru borders. This was his mission to lead, in success or failure, for better or for worse. Anya was meant to guide him, as is the duty of the Flamekeepers of Commanders past. 

Aden saw that they traveled from dawn to dusk, through the forest and small villages, well-tended farms and open field, through guarded paths, hunting grounds, reaper dens, and past several flaming towers. Come night, they would make camp – Azgedans on one side and the rangers on another. They would take turns cooking and eating by the life of the flame, and had established separate units to take shifts standing watch. At first, Aden had tried to make them all work together, eat together, and sleep together. But neither group trusted the other any more than they had to, and it quickly became easier and less tense to treat the units as two separate caravans with the same destination. 

Anya had drawn third watch, the last shift for the rangers. There were two warriors on first watch, three on second, and two on third. Aden had first watch, and so Anya stood guard over the camp with a young Ranger who wore the tooth of a great Shadowcat around her neck like a trophy. Anya didn’t know – or care to learn – the Ranger’s name, and had taken to calling her “Fang” when the necessity arose. 

Fang liked to talk about Reaper hunting. With no wars, the Rangers made something of a sport out of the hunt, and like most Rangers, Fang prided herself on her headcount. Most nights, she spent her watch sharpening her blade with a whetstone, “In case a dull-witted reaper chanced its luck,” but when Anya tried to explain that Reapers didn’t care how sharp her blade was, she started going on about how she once raided a reaper den with nothing but the dirk on her hip and proceeded to reenact the entire debacle so that Anya could ‘ _ better appreciate’ _ what she had accomplished. After that, Anya made sure to keep as much distance from her night watch companion as possible. 

In the mornings Anya would find the Azgedan seconds getting carved with red steel. At first, she wasn’t sure why. She knew that the scars were similar to the kill marks of Trikru warriors, but their hunting had been reserved to deer and boars and there was no clan that she was aware of that rewarded their warriors with marks for killing an animal. It wasn’t until an Azgedan elite had insisted upon camping near the heart of the Reaper Deepground that Anya finally figured out that the Azgedans were sending their seconds to hunt reapers in the night. 

One morning, one of the seconds ran into camp just as the first fingers of light reached over the horizon, waving around a severed arm. The hand had six clawed fingers – two of them being thumbs – and the arm appeared to have been hacked off by several blunt strikes just below the elbow. The warriors planned to strip and clean the arm so that the second could wear the bones around their neck and tied the severed limb with a rope so that it dangled from the side of one of their Elk stags.

Another day they had passed a fresh trail of prints near a shallow stream. The water was a murky, blue-green with thorny red reeds that stood tall over the water’s surface. To Trikru, they knew this waster was rich with ingredients for Fisa potions and salves. Aden allowed his ranges to collect materials and supplies but before they could properly dismount, four seconds ran off the path to follow the muddy prints. Several hours later they found their way back the group with the carcass of a twin-faced deer and the head of horned reaper woman and two small children.

Aden paid then no mind. Hunting reapers and boar were far less dangerous than the alternative to what they could he doing, so he didn’t see much of a point to further stress to a delicate situation without the absolute need to do so. If someone wandered off to hunt or kill, Aden would instruct the group to continue onward without them. When they returned, with or without a prize, they reported where they went and what they saw to someone and the message would inevitably find its way to Aden.

To him, that was all that mattered.

That next night, Anya awoke with a sudden strike of fear several hours before her watch. The embers of the fire had dwindled to nothing more than cracked red lines in the blackness of the night and there was nothing her ill-adjusted eyes could find to lead her to believe they were in immediate danger. With nothing else to be done, she threw a few more logs on the on the fire and pulled her cloak tighter around her form, clutching her swords tight against her chest before drifting into a light snooze before someone came to switch positions with her.

The next morning, when her headcount came up one short, Anya realized what had awoken her that night. That evening, after they feasted on roasted rabbits, fish, and bird eggs, she mentioned it to Aden. 

“The scarecrow’s gone,” she said, picking out the last morsels of rabbit meat from between the bones. “You notice?”

Aden shook his head while sucking on a bone of his own, but the look in his eyes told her that he didn’t doubt her. He leaned towards Anya, keeping his gaze elsewhere while he tucked the bone in his cheek. “Think he died?” His asked, voice hardly more than a whisper.

“No.” Anya could understand why he would have come to that conclusion. The Azgedan warrior she called ‘scarecrow’ was gaunt in the face and leather skinned with hair as thin and coarse as straw. He never did much; sat on his three eyed elk and shit in the woods and coughed all night, but he rarely contributed to hunting and never partook in Azgeda’s watch. He appeared to be extremely frail; just one puff of wind away from being snapped in two. “Azgeda brought him for a reason. It wasn’t to go off and die.”

“Maybe he died in his sleep and someone already took care of the body,” Aden tried. 

“No Pyre.” Anya told him, tossing the bone over her shoulder. “No search or even a recognition that he’s gone.”

“Reapers?” Her silence spoke volumes and Aden began to fidget as he contemplated the situation. 

Anya reached for another stick of meat and began picking at the roasted flesh. She really shouldn’t have helped herself to another, but if the scarecrow warrior was gone, he wouldn't’ care if missed his evening meal. “You can’t prevent everything,” Anya drawled, twisting the skewer in her fingers. “But you can take action when people move against you.”

Aden thought on this, but Anya noted her words did little to quell the nervous fidgeting the young flamekeeper had adopted to soothe himself. “I won’t let another one disappear,” Aden resolved. “It won’t happen again.”

After that, Aden kept a closer watch on their Azgedan travel companions. The scarecrow never returned, and despite Anya’s eavesdropping, she never found anyone to have mentioned the warrior’s existence at all. They did, however, gripe at every given opportunity about Aden’s change of leadership and the harsh, untrusting, childish behavior he began to rule with. They found his firm hand unsettling and unfair, a product of inexperience and doubt. These rumors, once spoken with quiet tongue in the shadows of night, soon found their way to loud protests and open defiance that challenged the young Flamekeeper at every pass.

Aden pushed them harder in return, making their days longer and their bodies weary. One of the seconds started to trail behind, and Aden commanded that she either find a ride atop one of their Elks or he would tie the second to one of his horses and drag her behind them until she either shaped up or died. An Azgedan allowed her their mount and Anya saw upon the switch that the soles of her boots had worn through and her feet had become bloodied and swollen from their travels. 

They passed through a village and, despite the unwelcomed glares, Aden stopped them at a moss-covered Inn. He dismounted and demanded that the village send their healers see to his people – starting with the second whose swollen feet had darkened and began to ooze with pus. He also commanded that the rangers forbid any villagers from mistreating their Azgedan guests and to bring anyone who dared differently before him. There was a perpetual stew pot that the warriors were welcomed to for a hot meal and even a bathhouse at the mossy Inn and as beds were being made for them all, Aden insisted that hot water, soap, and a salt scrub would do them all more good for the journey ahead than any bed could. 

“Ain’t nothing in this world better than what a bed could do for ya, boy,” one of the Azgedan’s laughed, starting a chorus with the others. “But I doubt the forest girls do half as good as the ones back home, so maybe you're right. Guess I’ll have to take it upon myself to find out.”

“You actually think someone would touch you? You flatter yourself,” Anya sneered, snaking her arm around Aden’s shoulders and pulling him away. “There isn’t enough gold in all the clans to make someone pretend you’re any less ugly.”

“At least I look better than you,” he said, waving a knife around her disfigured scars. “I’d rather be dead than kept alive by vipers. You’re past your prime, Flamekeeper. Remember that.” 

Anya pushed his blade out of her face. “You forget your place.”

He flicked the dirk back between her eyes and spat. “You overestimate yours.”

Anya’s fingers curled into white knuckled fists. She felt her arms tighten from her battle for restraint and a tug at her tunic from behind. Anya’s swiveled, and upon seeing Aden’s face, forced herself to recollect patience. 

“Stand down,” Aden demanded, squaring his shoulders. “Both of you.” 

A muscle jumped in the warrior’s cheek. “Big voice, little man. You got big skills to back it up?” He asked, pulling on his whiskers.

Anya pulled one of her twin swords over her shoulder and stabbed through the air to touch the unshaven flesh of the warrior’s neck. “Say that again,” she challenged, which only made the white warrior flare with excitement.

Aden put himself between them and shoved them apart. “You,” he pointed to the Azgedan as he pushed Anya further back. “Find a woman – or a man, I don’t care – if you can but should you force yourself on anyone, I will have your own people cut you down and fill your head with horse shit. Do you understand?”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, boy,” he warned, sheathing his dagger. 

“Don’t underestimate me,” Aden growled back. 

The aggression to his tone seemed to tickle the seasoned warrior. He relaxed, chuckled, and pressed a hand into Aden’s head to ruffle his hair. “There you go making promises again,” he sighed, expelling whatever had riled him up with a long, controlled breath. He cracked his neck then and turned his attention towards the bathhouse while rubbing his scarred leathery hands against one another in a fit of greed and excitement. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have my own promises to keep.”

Coalition or not, Azgeda and Trikru had generations of war and hatred between them. Anya despised having to look past it. She wanted drive her sword through their eye sockets and parade around her village with their entrails hanging from her neck like a scarf. She wanted to make banners from their skin and pick food from her teeth with their bones. “Jak of,” She said, letting the anger slip past her teeth.

“Ku.” He grinned and gestured down at himself as if he was some sort of prize. “Ai ogud.”

Anya’s features wrinkled with disgust. “I’d sooner fuck a reaper.” 

“You’d sooner fuck a viper. Wait –” His smirk twisted. “I forgot. That’s no insult, it’s a fact. Trikru loves to get fucked bowlegged by the vipers.” He started at the belt around his trousers and the other winter warriors began to hoot and cheer. Anya worked her grip around the hilt of her sword, fingers clenching and wrist turning as she fought the urge to cut him down. He noticed, of course; eyes trailing down as his lips curled into a wicked grin. “Go on then. Show me what it is they do that you all like so much. Maybe, if I enjoy myself, I’ll return the favor. Like good allies do.”

She chewed the inside of her cheeks, tasting the iron of blood as it danced across her tongue. In the orange light of the setting sun, the Azgedan looked repulsive. The colors of the forest did little to compliment his swollen red, worm lips or his bulbous pink nose or that mess of braided straw he called a beard. Anya had always thought all Azgedans looked stomach churningly ugly, but this man – with his manhood dangling out from between his unlaced trousers and his ugly worm lips – looked worse than any man she’d ever laid eyes on. 

“Get that thing anywhere near me and I’ll offer it to the pot.”

The Azgedan bellowed a loud and unabashed sort of laugh that drew the attention of everyone around them. Warriors and villages alike had circled around, his laughter infecting the other winter warriors and encouraging them to join in his chorus. “It's a good thing you’re not a whore, Flamekeeper. With a face that fucked you’d only ever bring in the blind.”

“Blind men won’t want her neither,” someone in the crowd shouted.

The circle broke into guffaw again. “Hear that? A bitch as ugly as you couldn’t even get a blind man off. So, consider yourself lucky and get to—” 

Crimson watered the ground, spewing out from around the steel dirk planted in the Azgedan’s chest. Aden released his grip on the dagger’s hilt, letting the warrior’s fingers tremble over to it in weakened desperation before falling to his knees and then flat on his belly; dagger plunging itself ever deeper as it lodged itself between the warrior and the blood-soaked dirt. “I told you not to force yourself, domas.”

Everything came to a jarring halt. Anya’s body became heavy and frozen like stone, watching as thin trails of blood pooled around the toes of Aden’s leather boots. He stared down at the corpse, strawberry blonde hair ruffled and out of place swimming in a fur cloak designed for a much larger man. He looked like a boy younger than his years and yet he gazed upon the body as if he had killed dozens before – bored and unsatisfied. 

They had already lost one, she reminded herself. That was one too many, but it was one they could abolish themselves from blame over. Not this. Not with Lexa’s acting commander slaughtering an unsuspecting warrior in a crowd full of people. Trikru could argue that Aden placed a warning, as he did, plain and clear for everyone to witness. Trikru could take a pledge of honesty before their commander and plead Lexa to see their words as true and sharp as steel. But even if with that truth and the countless witnesses within the village, it meant nothing. 

Lexa trained under Anya and Aden under Lexa. Their ties ran deep and everyone knew. To top it off, all three of them hailed from Trikru lands. If Lexa sided with Trikru when Azgeda claimed the attack to be unwarranted, they would follow suit with claims of nepotism and put Lexa in a other corner that forced her to destroy the very Coalition she dedicated her life to forging. Adding in the disappearance of the scarecrow only gave them more fuel to the flames of the commander’s suspected lack of competence. 

“Oh,” one of the other white warriors with a shaven head and raised rippled scars down his scalp howled, his head dipping to one side as he fingered the bone crested pummel of his longsword. He drew his sword, sharpened steel scraping along the scabbard like a battle cry. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

Aden shuffled back and Anya threw one arm around to shield the boy as she snaked in front him, sword pointing defensively between them. “Don’t even think about it,” she warned, reaching for her other blade. 

“I wouldn’t,” the bald warrior sneered. “If I die here, who would bring word to my queen that the Commander’s flamekeeper slaughtered her own? You?”

Anya spat. Of course, he was going to tell the queen. “And what happens when I tell the Commander that one of your own wandered off the course? Put her people in danger?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stepped forward, fingers still dancing over the pommel of his sword as he looked down on upon her. It was a challenge in which victory came in the form of self-preservation. The sort of challenge in which a game of swords was hinted at, but never played. The sort of challenge that winning could very well mean losing. 

Anya steeled her jaw. “Straw hair and bone thin.” She pointed back towards the bathhouse where the horses and Elks were being fed and brushed. “Rode that one there – three eyed stag.”

“That’s Oran’s stag.” He said the name as if she was supposed to know what it meant. Anya had thought she had been clear in her lack of desire in concerning herself with learning the names of the warriors and seconds in the caravan. It was rare for her to speak to anyone other than Aden and she tried her hardest not to need to speak at all. The other seemed to notice her blank expression and found reason to further explain, pointing to another face in the crowd of whom Anya hardly recognized beyond scars and the smell of horse ass. “Fisa. Only healers ride ones with three eyes.”

She was going to say that this Oran looked nothing like the missing warrior but someone else in the crowd spoke out first. “She’s lost her damn mind. Delusional bitch.” 

“Can’t tell us apart,” the bald one pushed a prodding finger into her chest. ‘Can you?” He laughed then, waving the crowd away as if to pity her. “Shame. You should have retired when you had the chance, Flamekeeper Your paranoia might have just cost your little commander her precious coalition. Just like it did that girl’s head.”


	7. Bellamy

Bellamy paced the metal halls; back and forth and back again. He hated waiting. He was never any good at it. Bellamy liked things he was good at: being a brother, being in charge, firing a gun, skinning a deer, living. He liked living most of all. The best part about living was the Earth. For Bellamy, everything worth living for came into his life the day he shot Jaha and plummeted down to the unknown with his sister. Before, all he had was Octavia. Every breath he took was for her. To feed her, clothe her, care for her when she was sick, to read her stories from the books he snuck out of the library. It was all he had. Now, he had more. 

He pivoted and paced back down the hall. 

Octavia could take care of herself. She didn’t need him anymore, but Bellamy was still her brother and he still looked out for her. He hadn’t lost anything in her discovery of independence. But the time he spent caring for her was now spent caring for others. He had friends who respected him, relied on him, trusted him. They had their families, their friends, and Bellamy wanted to keep them safe and happy just as much as he did his sister. It was a heavy burden and he had carried it alone for so long he had forgotten what it was like to share the load. 

He pivoted again and started the other way. 

But then there was Clarke. Clarke who had been his equal. Who had shared the weight of responsibility and survival with him when he needed it most. Clarke who carried the weight of war all alone, because she didn’t want Bellamy to have to bear the consequences. Clarke, who saw a leader of people in Bellamy when all he saw in himself was desperation. Clarke, princess of the Arkadian elite: she had become one of the most important of them all. 

Letting her go was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He had sent more search parties after her than he could count. Spent even more nights looking for her himself. He thought – everyone thought – she was dead. He even planned a memorial for her, but her mother refused. Having a service meant accepting her death. They all thought she was crazy. Turned out she was right. 

He pivoted again. 

_ A dead woman _ , he thought. She was dead to him – he accepted that – and now she wasn’t. She was sitting in the skeletal remains of Arkadia locked up like the criminal they always falsely accused her to be while the real criminals – murderers like him – walked free: forgiven. 

His fist found the steel walls, a clamor echoing down the halls. Pain resonated down his forearm and he shook his wrist violently as he pulled his hand away, cursing, “Shit, shit, shit,” all the while. The last thing he needed right now was to get himself thrown into medical. He squeezed his fingers into a fist and let the fires of pain sear through his veins until he trembled. 

All this power, respect, for what? For Clarke – broken and bloody – to be locked away where no one could reach her? He cursed again, louder this time, and pressed his forehead against the steel of Arkadia in defeat. What was the point in being respected and strong if he couldn’t protect anyone? 

“Bellamy?” 

He turned his head, eyes red and vision blurry, to find Raven standing at the opposite end of the hall. Her slick pony tail was let put and instead her hair was pulled around to one side where hung just below the shoulder. “What do you want, Raven?”

She didn’t dare cross the distance between them, Bellamy knew. Instead, she folded her arms over her chest and shifted her weight onto her good leg and leaned into the doorway. “You know I can see you on the cameras, right?” She pointed up above her where the light of a small camera blinked at him.

“So , don’t look at the cameras.” He turned his back to her and looked down the opposite end of the hall to where the door that separated Clarke from the rest of the world taunted him.

He could hear Raven limp across the halls. “She can’t leave that room Bellamy. You know why she can’t.”

He spun, flinging his arm around in a defiant twister. “To hell with that bullshit,” he growled. “You waste months of oxygen on a zero - gravity joyride, I shoot the Chancellor, and Clarke gets to sit in lockup for keeping everyone alive.” 

“She’s in lockup because–”

“Because some grounder friend of my sister said so?” Bellamy cut. “Since when do we listen to grounders anyway?”

Raven smiled. “We’re the hundred,” she said. “We don’t listen to anyone.”

Just then, Bellamy noticed Monty in the doorway , smiling even more than Raven.  “You know, if you weren’t so hot headed, Raven would have told you we  put the camera feed on a loop half an hour ago.”

Bellamy looked at them  with narrowed eyes and a squinted  feature painted with confusion.  “What are you talking about?”

Raven pointed to the door across the hall.  “We  wanted to see Clarke – “

“So , we’re hacking the system,” Monty finished for her.  He flashed a small computer chip, no bigger than a fingernail, pinched by the corners between his thumb and index finger. “Raven and I did put it together after all.”

“Which means we know how to take it apart.” Raven  lugged across the hall and slung her arm around Bellamy’s shoulder. “Aren’t you glad you’re one of us?”

This time it was Bellamy’s turn to smile. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

At the end of the hallway that led to Clarke’s makeshift  cell (or was it  her makeshift medical Bay) , someone had installed a terminal system. There was a  crude hole cut in the metal paneling in which  a  small, square screen attached itself to a wire filled metal pipe that jutted out of the hole. Exposed wires were taped up against the metal rod to keep it from being accidently unplugged by reckless guards while an additional wire was tapped up the wall and over the door, where it attached to black half circle with a singular glowing red light that blinked at him every few seconds.

Monty reached around the back of the monitor, and fiddled with the machinery. The screen flashed off and on and off again, blue, green, red, and then a backlit black with the white emblem of Arkadia – a new design to reflect their new home. “Alright, let’s get started.” A series of characters swept across the screen like the credits of an old movie in hyper speed. Monty cracked his  knuckles , all three that he could crack, and drew his fingers across the screen, spinning the interface and preparing the machine for whatever it was Monty planned to do. He pinched at the edge of a glass shelf as a blue light spilled down below the monitor and pulled it out from its protective casing. The glass reflected the light in a display that mimicked an old keyboard, reading his fingers as he ran them over different symbols and characters to input them in the code. 

Raven leaned into Bellamy as they watched Monty work. It was one of the only times Raven was as useless as he was when it came to  the language of technology. They had both learned that it was often best to simply let Monty do whatever it was he did best.  After a moment, the terminal emitted a light chime and Monty pushed the glass keypad back into cover with a satisfied grin. He removed the chip and the doors to Clarke’s cell swept open with a hiss , revealing the hidden contents Bellamy had  wanted so badly see. 

“Shit,” Raven breathed. “Abby must feel awful.”

The cell was a mass of beeping machines and tangled wires that dropped down through the ceiling and pooled on the ground. It was an ugly, dull grey with no more than a single light that emitted from  where the ceiling met the  back wall. The cell’s metal bunk jutted outwards from the left  wall  and had become something of a makeshift work station  housing  every form of medical tool or medicine  Arkadia had:  Syringes, bagged  blood ,  scalpel, clamps, bandages upon bandages, and vial after vial of what remained of their precious medical reserves. Beneath the bunk was an assortment of grounder medicines that made far less sense to him and didn’t seem to work nearly as well, but Bellamy wasn’t in a position to argue with Abby when it came to saving the life of her own daughter.

Clarke rested on a stretcher that had been pushed against the back wall underneath the singular light fixture. She had needles prodding into both arms and straps fastening her wrist down so she couldn’t move. There was fabric bandaging wrapped around her forehead, left arm and chest, and both her legs. They hadn’t bothered to dress her, but they had draped a thin cotton sheet over her waist and thighs.  Beneath her was the remains of the strange grounder healing techniques used to keep her alive before she arrived in Arkadia. Clumps of dried, blue mud and leaves sat around her in a dusty ring that fanned across the cell in light footprint shapes. He could see where Abby would work, where she would pace up and down the of Clarke’s cot, where she would sit, everything.

Abby said that sometimes Clarke would phase in and out of consciousness , but that even when she was awake ,  she didn’t  see her daughter.  He didn’t know what that meant at the time.  He figured that being  arrested and kept in  isolation,  dropped on the ground , left to die , burning several hundred people alive,  killing the boy she loved, and then melting the faces off of several hundred more (and that’s just what he knew about) was enough to change Clarke from the girl her mother knew to the woman  he had known .  But, when he looked upon her sunken cheeks, braided hair ,  and  scared skin, Bellamy wondered if  that woman was gone too. 

Raven seated herself on the metal bedframe and crossed her arms over chest. “She looks worse than I did.”

“You both were lucky to be alive,” Monty said, placing himself at Clarke’s feet. He studied her, eyes trailing up and down her tattered form and  then settled on the remnants of what of been Clarke’s belongings under the aluminum frame of  her cot. “But this...” his voice trailed off, but Bellamy didn’t need to hear what he had to say to know what he was thinking.

Bellamy rolled one of the beeping machines aside and placed himself next to Clarke’s head. Someone had attempted to clean her, but her hair looked dusty and matted, like old straw. He remembered the flowing gold – the way it ran like water when she pulled her fingers through it – and he touched her. His rough fingers meeting clumps of yellow tangles and stubborn earth.

Clarke stirred at his touch with a disgruntled groan. She turned her head and glossy blue eyes found him. She was confused and exhausted, hardly aware of where she was or what was happening, but when her vision settled, Bellamy could see a smile fight its way onto her lips when she realized he was here with her in the cell they called her intensive care unit. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Clarke gazed up at him with sleepy eyes and shook her head. “Don’t apologize,” She told him. “just, don’t. Okay?”

“I won’t,” he promised. He reached out to her frail fingers, and cupped her hand in his own. He promised, he reminded himself. He would have to come up with something else to tell her now, but he wasn’t sure what to say. Everything that came to mind started with an apology Clarke didn’t want to hear.

Thankfully, he wasn’t alone and  Monty was quick to fill the silence. “I know you probably aren’t happy to be back, but we’re glad you’re here.”

“So, as the delinquents we are, we broke in to tell you that.” Raven glanced over towards the door and then back at Clarke, her face more serious than before. “And also, we wanted to make sure you were okay .”

Clarke had nothing to say to this and  cast her gaze elsewhere.  “You’re a part of the council now,” Clarke said, eyeing the patch on his guard uniform that marked him as a member of the high council. “Good. You deserve it.”

Bellamy disagreed. “If you would have been here, it’d be you with the council seat, not me.”

Her fingers tightened around his and pulled away. “I doubt that.” She closed her eyes , and for a long while there was nothing but the sound of machines tracking Clarke’s vitals and a rhythmic beeping that mimicked her heartbeat. She opened them again, but they did not find him this time. This time, Clarke’s eyes stared into the dull grey wall that was the celling of her cell. “I’m not good like you are.”

“You’re better than I am.”

“Better at killing, maybe.” She closed her eyes again and her face fell to Bellamy’s side. “I’m great at that.”

Bellamy reached over and pushed Clarke’s hair from her eyes. “You’re great at doing what needs to be done.” He wanted to say more, but he bit his tongue. Telling her of all the lives she saved would almost certainly remind her of all the lives she took to save them. Bellamy knew as well as anyone that it hadn’t been an even trade and he was willing to bet that there were some in Arkadia just waiting for the opportunity to remind her of that. Those very same people had done plenty to remind him and Monty of their choices over the past four years.

Again, Clarke avoided answering them . 

From the beginning, Clarke was different from the rest of the Earth castaways. She didn’t trust anyone and she was far too privileged for the others to trust her. Where Bellamy found friendship with the delinquents, Clarke found hers with their enemies. She trusted people when no one else did, and did the things no one else could do. Even now, looking this person who used to be the Clarke he knew, he could tell she was nothing like him.

Monty was squatting beside the cot shaking a vial of something black and separated; the upper portion a translucent, murky yellow and the bottom a dense, pitch black. He swirled the contents in the vial until he found a glossy black consistency and pulled the cork top. “Ugh.” He shoved the cork back into the vial. “That smells disgusting.”

“Clarke,” Raven asked, ignoring him. “What happened after you left?”

Clarke shifted her eyes to Raven for a moment. They soon found their way to the grey walls of the room and settled there. Her body was rigid and stiff and Bellamy could tell she had  steeled her jaw and was chewing down whatever enamel she had left after years of angry grinding. Her nostrils flared with a forceful breath and Clarke closed her eyes. “A lot,” she said. That was all she said.

For several long, painstaking minutes, no one said anything. Other than the monitors the only sound in the room was the metal cuffs that chained Clarke’s arms to the bed as she tried to wrench herself into a different position.

‘Oh,” Raven realized. “Right.” she pulled a ring of keys from pocket of her jacket and fumbled through them. “Pike’s gonna be pissed, but,” she drawled as she uncuffed one of Clarke’s wrists. “What else is new?”

“Pike?” Clarke asked, rubbing her wrists as she sat up. “Earth Skills Pike?”

“Pike convinced Abby to transfer you to Walden first thing tomorrow morning,” Raven admitted with a sour scorn etched across her face. “For your safety.”

“The three of you were lucky,” Monty told them as he ran his fingers through his long hair, pushing it away from his eyes that he kept glued to  the  vials under Clarke’s bed. “He gave us the worst crash course ever before we came down here. We probably would have been better off without it honestly. I mean,” he waved a hand between the three. “Look at all of you.”

“Wait a minute,” Bellamy said holding out a hand. “Did you say Clarke is being transferred to Walden? Since when?”

Raven shrugged. “The last power surge, I think.  For Abby, the idea of losing Clarke to unstable technology when we have consistent power and resources at our other facility was enough of a scare for her to reconsider Pike’s proposal.”

Pike’s proposal, for as far as Bellamy was concerned, was a load of shit. “I guess our little break it is turning into a rescue mission, then.”

“Wait .” Clarke  pulled at the needles and tubing in her  arms and tossed them on the ground. “What are you talking about? What’s Walden?”

“It's the name they gave to the mountain facility,” Monty confessed. “Pike planned on keeping you sedated and transferring you there for “treatment and security purposes”. Says with the grounders around you’re too much of a target and Arkadia isn’t equipped to protect you. He basically thinks you're a liability, but since you’re Abby’s daughter–.” 

“Bellamy,” the radio on  Bellamy’s jacket  cracked. “We have a problem.”

Bellamy sucked in air  through his teeth  and looked at Monty and Raven , exchanged nods. “I’m on my way. Hold position until I get there.” 

“Go,” Monty told him, slipping his arm under an irritated and confused Clarke and wrapping it around her waist. “I’ll take care of Clarke and Raven will convince Abby not to send her to Walden.”

“We got this,” Raven encouraged.

Bellamy chanced a glance at Clarke. She was biting down on her cheeks with more intensity than he had ever seen and looked to him with darkened eyes blacker than then nothingness between the stars. Her stare was painful to keep, and so Bellamy threw his eyes to the side and nodded to Monty’s plan, signaling he understood.

He wasn’t sure how this was supposed to work. Clarke was hardly in any position to step away from medical. There was no way they could convince anyone that she was well enough for discharge, not really. She was a mess, smashed to smithereens both physically and emotionally and, well, Clarke hadn’t been in the best mental state from the beginning. It was the whole reason they put her back in isolation in the first place. She was safer in there, according to the other council members, both to herself and to those around her. Bellamy was sure at the time that they were all full of shit, but now he wondered if they may have held some truth to their words. Still, he didn’t like the idea of sending Clarke to Walden. No one who had been held captive by the people of the mountain shelter could stand to go back, why should Clarke be any different?

Sure, Bellamy considered for the sake of discussion, Octavia did show up with more than just a bloodied body. She had come with a warning; several warnings if one were to be precise (or paranoid). It was no secret that Clarke had been hunted since she left the settlement once known as Camp Jaha and Bellamy spent the better part of a year tearing down parchment that resembled her likeness in the hope that if people forgot her face, they might forget her. But Clarke’s disappearance seemed permanent and the camp moved on without her; it became Arkadia and Arkadia thrived without Clarke. 

Bring in Lincoln’s disappearance and later reappearance, Clarke resurfacing from a universally believed death, and the grounder Commander’s decision to let the grounders of Sector 7 across what was once perceived as a forced DMZ, Octavia was right to come to them with warnings. Bellamy could also argue that he had already taken precautions for security before Ice Nation warriors were running rampant through the forest, but Octavia had insisted that they needed to take a different route if they intended to keep everyone alive.

Octavia convinced the council to do things her way. Most of the guard had their weapon privileges revoked. The mountain had to cease production outside of all absolute necessities for underground survival. Search lights and other electronically powered devices that Raven had managed to get working over the years were turned off and Arkadia was left to hide behind their walls in the dark. The worst part, because somehow all of those other things were not the worst part, was the insistence that Clarke be treated as threat to the Sky People. 

In short: Arkadia having Clarke again made the grounders nervous, and if the grounders saw Arkadia as a threat then the entire army of the coalition would at their walls and this time, they wouldn’t be able to sacrifice someone to avoid a war. That argument led to the idea that the people of Arkadia were better protected if Clarke was locked away inside the carcass of the grounder's greatest enemy. 

Bellamy didn’t agree, and it appeared that some of the other hundred (whatever was left of the hundred) felt the same. Some of them, he knew, did agree with the council, and this grounder coming to their gates would only further that belief. 

Lincoln met Bellamy at the wall and fell into step alongside him. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Any uninvited grounder at our gates is bad news, Lincoln,” Bellamy told him, reaching for the iron rungs of the wall tower. “Just tell me if you know who it is.”

“Everyone knows who the Commander is, Bellamy.”

Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to hear that .  He released the rung and instead rounded the edge of the wall, much like Octavia had before Clarke was brought home.  The stopped shy of the wall and instead let the biometric scan read his features and allow him passage into the armory. He grabbed the first gun inside and locked the door  behind him before returning to the  iron ladder. 

He hung the gun from a strap over shoulder and ascended the rungs. Of all the guard posted, only Nathan Miller had been entrusted to remain armed. His experience as part of Bellamy’s Militia during first contact gave him a level of trust and superiority over most of the guard. Those serving on the Ark before the crash were lacking in Earth experience and those recruited after were lacking in every type of experience. Nathan was one of only a handful of soldiers that Bellamy trusted to make the right call and it appeared that he had. The barrel of his gun was pointed down at the grounder on the other side of the wall, but it didn’t take much observation for Bellamy to see that his finger wasn’t on the trigger.

Bellamy followed Miller’s gun over the other side of the wall where the Commander of the twelve clans Lexa kom Trikru waited below. She looked, strangely ill-prepared standing there with a horse and no guards or army to protect her. The war paint that he become iconic and distinguishing was faded and smeared, and her usual fiery stare was lacking without the blackness of paint to accentuate it. Still, that did not mean she was any less intimidating. Before she noticed Bellamy, he caught a glimpse of her daring glare directed at Miller. “What the hell is she doing here?” He asked.

“We don’t know,” Lincoln reported as he joined Bellamy atop the wall. “She’s never done anything like this before. No commander has.”

Miller adjusted his grip on his gun. “I got an easy shot. I can take her out.”

“Not yet.” Bellamy looked back off the edge. “How long as she been here?”

“Long enough to start freaking people out.” Miller cocked his head and peered through the scope of the rifle. “She looks at you like she’s going to suck out your soul.”

Lincoln folded his arms over his chest. Bellamy still hadn’t gotten used to how thin Lincoln had become since he left Arkadia, but he was happy to see the man up and moving around again. Somehow, despite the loss of muscle mass, Lincoln still looked every bit as terrifying as he had when he was  Bellamy’s prisoner in the drop ship. Massive muscles shrunken down to hard, jagged ones that matched the stone-cold expression that he wore to mask his gentle demeanor that Bellamy hadn’t seen since before he left. “She wants to talk. She wouldn’t have come here alone if she didn’t.” 

Bellamy reached for his rifle. “So then let’s talk.” 

“Not you.” Lincoln’s hand touched his arm. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“She’ll recognize my leadership before she does anyone else on the council.” Bellamy stiffened and pulled his arm away from Lincoln’s touch. “You?” he asked, pointing. “You think she’ll talk to you?”

Lincoln looked over the edge and  Bellamy watched as the man’s studious eyes flickered with thought . “Me and Octavia. No  weapons. No guns .”

“I’m not taking my  cross hairs off  her,” Miller protested , shrugging his shoulders to reposition the gun.  “She’s got a sword. You go down there with no weapons and she’ll cut you down just like she did her own guard.”

“Gustus betrayed her,” Lincoln reminded.

“And she betrayed us,” Miller pushed back.

Lincoln turned to Bellamy, waiting for his input on the matter. Bellamy knew he was anything but the expert source on grounder relations. Kane had somehow wiggled himself into a man that bartered with grounders and earned something akin to respect among them, and his sister – sometimes Bellamy felt Octavia was more Grounder than she was Arker. 

“Kane  and I too,” Bellamy decided. “And we lower our guns when she surrenders her sword.”

Lincoln gave him a hesitant nod and disappeared down the tower side in recruit of Octavia and Kane while Miller and Bellamy turned their attention back to other side of the wall where Lexa was still waiting for them. Bellamy never thought to credit her as a patient woman, but now that the thought was there, he decided it was a fitting observation. She hadn’t moved an inch since he scaled the wall and Bellamy wondered if she was really as cunning as Indra had always claimed her to be. At first glance, her decision to waltz up to the gates of Arkadia – by herself – with nothing more than a sword at her hip came across as complete ineptitude on the part of the great Commander of the twelve clans. But Bellamy was no fool. He could spot a work of devious intent and – inept or not – Lexa had a plan in mind; he just wished he knew what it was.

“Open the gates,” Bellamy announced with sudden intent, not bothering to wait for a response before descending the ladder and squeezing through the crack made between the two iron doors. He left a hand on his gun, hesitant to bring it up to his shoulder as the Commander’s eyes finally flickered down from the wall and over to him. From here she appeared tremendously more menacing than she had from above. She stared at him; green eyes glowing against a field of black, as unmoving and still as she had from the beginning. Her head was cocked slightly to the left and a spirited sort of smugness had painted itself across her features like a mask. 

Bellamy stopped halfway between Lexa and the wall, planting his boots deep into the wet ground. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice booming across the field between them.

Lexa’s voice carried back, “To talk.”

“So, talk.” He pulled his gun across his midsection.

“Not to you.” 

Judging by her tone it wasn’t something that was up for debate. However, Bellamy realized with a smirk, she was in no position to debate at all. “I’m a member of the council of Arkadia. I speak for these people, so you will speak to me or you won’t speak at all.”

Lexa turned her eyes from Bellamy back up to the soldiers on the wall. She watched them for a few moments, finding no sense of urgency or respect to the conversation Bellamy had granted her. Instead she studied her surroundings, taking her time scanning the walls before bringing her attention back to Bellamy where she continued to refuse him her words.

Until she didn’t. 

“Then I will wait,” she announced, seemingly settled in her decision and not at all frightened by the parade of bullets  waiting for her skull. 

Lexa kept a hand placed over her sword and resumed looking beyond Bellamy and to the gates behind him.  He was beginning to wonder if Lincoln  had found Kane and Octavia, if their presence would be of any benefit  to the situation or if it was just a waste of time. It didn’t take a genius to know why she was here. Octavia had said a report got sent to the capital regarding Clarke’s status and location when she brought her back. Clarke was a wanted woman, after all; by the Commander, by the Ice Nation, by everyone. Bellamy had assumed someone would come looking for her eventually, but he hadn’t planned on that person being the Commander herself. 

They stood there for a while; squinting at one another through blinding sunlight with chilling tendrils of wind drawing waves over their skin. At times, Bellamy would chance a glance back towards the gates, at Miller with his gun and the rest of the watch with their scrunched expressions of concern, at the gate that hadn’t budged since it closed behind him. Other times he would watch the Commander, whose steadfast gaze never wavered. And when his patience had reached the end of line, when he had exhausted every reason he had to keep himself planted between her and the city, he heard them yell, “Open the gates,” at last.

The gates groaned behind him and Lexa’s eyes began to grow wide. Her lips parted, her expression agape and as Bellamy turned his head to welcome his sister and the others his words became frozen in his throat. 

She was dressed in a black long  sleeved, distressed shirt that was entirely too long in the arms and entirely too small in the bust, black cargo pants that dragged in the mud and clung under the heel of her boots, and that blood stained, flowing cloak she had with her when she was first brought to them; golden hair shimmering a blinding white in the harsh sunlight. She walked with the faintest of limps with an expression of anger masking over pain on her face. Her fingers were clenched into tight fists that flinched with pain and muscles in her cheeks twitched under the pressure of her jaw. She shouldered past Bellamy, not bothering to grace him with a glance and rooted herself in front of Lexa.

Bellamy whirled around to where the gate was still open. Raven gave him a guilt-ridden grin, waving an awkward three fingered wave before sinking away, leaving Lincoln and Monty standing wide eyed and slightly terrified and a disgruntled Octavia flailing her arms out to drag Raven back into view. There was no sign of Kane, but when his radio cracked in his voice asking for Abby, he knew he was tracking down the other members of the council – Pike included.

“Clarke.”

Bellamy turned his attention back to women in front of him.

“Lexa.”

The cool wind grew thick and choking, and Bellamy gripped the barrel of his gun tighter still as silence coiled around his neck and his wrist and his ankles, binding him  there and forcing him to watch as the two women stared each other down with daggers of Ice and fire.

“That cloak—”

“You shouldn’t have come here ,” Clarke warned, her voice breaking the tense silence that settled between them. 

“ You didn’t leave me a choice,” Lexa said, her voice carrying across the field far softer than it had when she spoke with  him.  “Your people were safer when my people thought you were dead.”

Clarke turned  and looked back  at Bellamy, the gun in his hand.  She smiled at him, only for a moment, and then glanced behind him to the other delinquents standing in the ajar gates , and then up at the wall.  When she turned back to Lexa she folded her arms over her chest and said, “I think they can take care of themselves  just fine.”

Lexa gaze  stayed focused on Clarke. “That’s not what I said.”

“No , it’s not . It’s what I said. And we both know  whose word can actually be trusted.”

Again, Lexa didn’t speak. Although Bellamy got the feeling  that this time the Commander  stoic silence was not  because she  chose it,  but because she didn’t know what  to say. She was visibly struck by Clarke’s words , even if it was hard to see ; there was a pause in her  emotionless  guise, a sort of hiccup of  feeling that she had to force away.  Bellamy could see it, and he knew Clarke could see it too. 

Lexa put a hand over her sword, fingers tracing the pommel’s design as she contemplated something Bellamy could only guess would be her response. Each of her fingers curled slowly around the grip of her sword, coiled around the wrapped leather like a snake. Bellamy brought his gun to his shoulder with that and Lexa threw him a shady glare from across the field. 

Bellamy never trusted Lexa. Not really. Working with the grounders was Clarke’s idea, and he went along with it because he trusted her. He trusted Clarke and Clarke trusted Lexa – so Bellamy trusted Lexa. He put everyone’s lives in her hands, in the hands of an experienced war lord who had sent three hundred rangers to see them all dead – he sacrificed one of his own at her insistence – and she betrayed them all. She betrayed Clarke; broke her, and for that Bellamy despised her. 

“You should go,” Clarke said, bringing Lexa’s eyes away from Bellamy and back onto her. “There’s nothing left to be said here.” 

“ Clarke,” she urged, stepping forward to cross the field with fingers till wrapped around the pommel of her sword.  “ You don’t understand what it is you’ve done.”

“Not another step,” Bellamy warned, lining the iron sight of his gun up against Lexa.  He could feel his blood rushing through his veins, his heartbeat racing to keep up. He curled his finger over the trigger. He was shaking, his breath light and staggered and he hoped to whatever god it was the people of the ground were supposed to pray to that Lexa couldn’t see it. 

She looked at him, stopping in her tracks to size up his threat and the weapon in his hand and then turned her attention away and started forward again. Her, ignoring him. Her, with her hand on her weapon. Her, unafraid and challenging.  Her, with that same expression she had when he first met her – the look she had when her only plan was to kill them all and let their bodies rot under the heat of the orange sun.

And Bellamy hated her for that.

**Author's Note:**

> come chat with me at kiintsugi.tumblr.com and tell me what you think/what you want to see!


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